Biotechnology could revolutionise human life. Should it be allowed to?

Facing what was then an incurable cancer in 2022, Alyssa Tapley, then aged 13, became the first person in the world to receive a revolutionary new treatment.

- Zhaki Abdullah

A year earlier, the teenager from Leicestershire in Britain had been diagnosed with T-cell acute lymphoblastic leukaemia (T-ALL) — an aggressive form of blood cancer in which T-cells, a type of white blood cell, become malignant.

Using a technique known as “base editing”, doctors at Great Ormond Street Hospital in London were able to engineer a new type of T-cell that could hunt down and eliminate her cancerous T-cells.

Base editing allows scientists to change a single DNA letter — which are chemicals called nucleotides that make up the genetic code — into another with high precision.

Using a customised protein, base editing damages DNA less than CRISPR — an earlier gene-editing technology — as it nicks only one strand of the two in the double helix through rewriting, whereas CRISPR cuts through both to insert or change a gene.

Having undergone the experimental gene therapy in May 2022, Alyssa remains cancer-free four years later and now hopes to become a cancer scientist herself, the BBC reported.

She is one of the first 11 patients, across the Great Ormond Street and King’s College hospitals in London, to have received the new treatment, dubbed BE-CAR7.

A study published in the New England Journal of Medicine in December found that nine of the 11 had achieved remission, allowing them to undergo a bone marrow transplant, while seven remained disease-free between three months and three years after treatment.

A similar treatment for T-ALL, CD7 CAR T-cell therapy, was developed by the National University of Singapore’s Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine and the National University Health System.

The revolutionary treatment is just one application of biotechnology — an umbrella term for a broad field that combines biology and technology to create products used in healthcare, agriculture, environmental management and other areas.