This story by Denise Grady in yesterday’s New York Times is getting plenty of attention. It doesn’t promise a cure for cancer – just a new lease on life for one little girl. The story starts out with Emma Whitehead doing somersaults just months after she was near death from leukemia.
Grady responsibly lists the failures as well as the past successes of this experimental leukemia treatment, in which HIV is used as the vector to insert new genes into the patient’s T cells. The genetic alteration is supposed to prompt the T-cells to kill malignant B-cells in the patient.
I read every word. The story managed to be a compelling read without overpromising. I wished the author had been able to get into a little more historical depth. Why wasn’t anyone using the term “gene therapy”? The experimental treatment was developed at Penn, the same institution that was responsible for the death of then 18-year-old Jesse Gelsinger in a gene therapy trial. Both experiments used a virus as a vector to insert new genes, and the terrible fever and swelling that almost killed the patient in this trial sounded similar to the symptoms Gelsinger suffered before he died.
This history went unmentioned, but it seemed too relevant to skip. I was also curious to know more about how this complex therapy was developed. How did the doctors come up with it? What other gene therapy trials are using forms of HIV? How was the concept tested before it was used in humans? Just a paragraph or two more science could have easily fit into the story without losing the narrative flow. The readers were hooked with the somersaults.
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