Miracle baby saved by world-first operation at Great Ormond Street Hospital
A baby girl with “incurable” leukaemia was saved when Great Ormond Street Hospital surgeons performed a “miracle” operation — a world first on a child.
One-year-old Layla Richards was in a “hopeless” condition when parents Lisa Foley and Ashleigh Richards begged doctors to “try anything” after chemotherapy and a bone marrow transplant failed.
The medics rapidly won ethical approval to use an experimental procedure trialled only on mice.
They injected Layla with a donor’s genes “edited” to fight the leukaemia while remaining “invisible” to the drugs she was receiving.
Today, two months after a second bone marrow transplant, Layla, of Enfield, was declared “cancer-free” and said to be doing well.
Doctors said it was too early to be sure she had been fully cured of “one of the most aggressive forms of the disease we have ever seen” but hailed her response to treatment as remarkable.
Professor Paul Veys, director of bone marrow transplant at GOSH, said: “As this was the first time we had used the treatment, we didn’t know if or when it would work — so we were over the moon when it did. Layla’s leukaemia was so aggressive that such a response is almost a miracle.”
Dr Sujith Samarasinghe, consultant paediatric haematologist at GOSH, said Layla had “about a few months” left.
He added: “There was no other potentially curative option.”
The treatment, only ever performed on one other human, uses “molecular scissors” to create designer immune cells. These were injected into Layla and removed after 12 weeks. Her immune system was so low she spent weeks in isolation to guard against infection.
Layla, who has an eight-year-old sister Reya, was born healthy but at the age of 14 weeks was diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukaemia. After a first bone marrow transplant, doctors realised that chemotherapy had failed to kill all the leukaemia cells and told her parents she was likely to die.
Mother Lisa said: “We didn’t want to accept palliative care so we asked the doctors to try anything for our daughter, even if it hadn’t been tried before.
“Doctors explained that even if we could try the treatment there was no guarantee it would work.”
"We asked the doctors to try anything for our daughter, even if it hadn’t been tried before."
Layla's mother, Lisa
Weeks later her husband phoned with news that the treatment had worked. “I just cried happy tears,” she said. “I consider ourselves lucky that we were in the right place at the right time to get a vial of these cells. Hopefully Layla will stay well and lots more children can be helped with this new treatment.”
Full clinical trials in larger groups of patients are set to begin early in 2016.
Professor Waseem Qasim, of the Institute of Child Health, said: “We have to be cautious about claiming this will be a suitable treatment option for all children but it is a landmark in the use of new gene engineering technology.
“If replicated, it could represent a huge step forward in treating leukaemia and other cancers.