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		</div><p>US officials have approved the first treatment that genetically engineers patients&#8217; own blood cells to seek and destroy a childhood leukaemia.</p>
<p>The CAR-T cell treatment developed by Novartis and the University of Pennsylvania is the first type of gene therapy to hit the US market &#8211; and one in a powerful but expensive wave of custom-made &#8220;living drugs&#8221; being tested against blood cancers and some other tumors.</p>
<p>The Food and Drug Administration called the approval historic.</p>
<p><i>&#8220;This is a brand new way of treating cancer,&#8221;</i> said Dr Stephan Grupp of Children&#8217;s Hospital of Philadelphia, who treated the first child with CAR-T cell therapy &#8211; a girl who had been close to death, but now is cancer-free for five years and counting.</p>
<p><i>&#8220;That&#8217;s enormously exciting.&#8221;</i></p>
<p>CAR-T treatment uses gene therapy techniques not to fix disease-causing genes, but to &#8220;turbo-charge&#8221; T cells, immune system &#8220;soldiers&#8221; that cancer can often evade.</p>
<p>Researchers filter the cells from a patient&#8217;s blood, reprogramme them with a &#8220;chimeric antigen receptor&#8221; that targets cancer, and grow hundreds of millions of copies.</p>
<p>Returned to the patient, the cells can continue multiplying to fight disease for months or years.</p>
<p>Novartis did not immediately disclose the therapy&#8217;s price, but it is expected to cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. It is made from scratch for every patient.</p>
<p>&#8220;We&#8217;re entering a new frontier in medical innovation with the ability to reprogramme a patient&#8217;s own cells to attack a deadly cancer,&#8221;</i> said FDA commissioner Scott Gottlieb.</p>
<p>This first use of CAR-T therapy is aimed at patients desperately ill with acute lymphoblastic leukaemia, which strikes more than 3,000 children and young adults in the US each year.</p>
<p>While most survive, about 15% relapse despite the current best treatments, and their prognosis is bleak.</p>
<p>In a key study of 63 advanced patients, 83% went into remission, although it is not clear how long the benefit lasts: Some patients did relapse months later.<br />
The others still are being tracked to see how they fare long-term.</p>
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