KarunaNews Story

A new living drug, produced at La Paz public hospital in Madrid, Spain, has saved the lives of eight young people suffering from an aggressive form of B-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia who had exhausted all conventional treatment options. This new CAR-T therapy involves implanting a synthetic molecule capable of detecting the CD19 protein in cancer cells of leukemia and lymphoma which can bind to tumor cells at two points, CD19 and CD22. Eight of the 11 patients saw their cancer become undetectable in just one month. The treatment is named after Ariana Benedé, an 18-year-old who helped advance the research before dying in 2016. Pediatrician Antonio Pérez, who directs the CRIS Unit for Advanced Therapies for Childhood Cancer, met one of London’s Great Ormond Street Hospital’s most legendary patients - Alyssa, a teenager with incurable leukemia who in 2022 became the first patient to receive cells from another person, modified with a kind of genetic pencil to prevent rejection. Pérez’s team is now also working with this genetic pencil to adapt donor white blood cells.