Welcome to the first edition of Upbeat, a weekly newsletter bringing you stories about people and projects that are changing the world.
A teenage girl is leukaemia-free after a world first in cell therapy - 13-year-old Alyssa said she felt that volunteering for the experimental new treatment for the disease would help others. “Of course I’m going to do it,” she said. Scientists have described the treatemnt as the most sophisticated cell engineering to date. Without the treatment, which came after chemotherapy and an initial bone marrow transplant failed to clear her cancer, Alyssa's only alternative would have been palliative care.
The teenager, from Leicester, received base-edited T-cells in the first ever use of a base-edited cell therapy at Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children. Pre-manufactured cells from a healthy volunteer donor were edited to enable them to hunt down and kill cancerous T-cells without attacking each other. T-cells are white blood cells that move around the body, finding and destroying defective cells.
Alyssa, who was diagnosed with T-cell acute lymphoblastic leukaemia, or T-All, in 2021, was given all the conventional treatments including chemotherapy and a bone-marrow transplant, but the disease returned. She then became the first patient enrolled on to a new clinical trial, funded by the Medical Research Council, during which she was given universal Chimeric Antigen Receptor T-cells that had been pre-manufactured from a healthy volunteer donor in May this year.
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'Iraq's Steve Irwin' fights extinction and climate change - From trawling animal markets to appearing on TV with a python around his neck, Mahdi Laith is educating children about the importance of nature in every way he can. Mr Mahdi is part of a growing environmental activist community in Iraq, a country which is ranked the fifth most vulnerable in the world to climate change, according to the UN Environment Programme. It is even more critical now, as the population of 40 million has been reeling under extreme weather events over the past three years that have badly affected communities and livelihoods.
Saudi endurance swimmer Mariam bin Laden has made history again — this time as the first woman and first Arab to swim from Saudi Arabia's Tiran Island to Sharm El Sheikh in Egypt. Bin Laden, a dentist and advocate for Syrian refugees, joined fellow endurance swimmer and UN Patron of the Oceans Lewis Pugh in the Coral Swim event in the Red Sea. They were aiming to bring attention to the devastating effects of climate change on coral reefs ahead of Cop27.
Quoted...
- Lynn Gaspard on the closure of Al Saqi, London's oldest Arabic bookstore
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