GOSH to be first in UK to offer groundbreaking cancer therapy supported by your Payroll Giving donations

Great Ormond Street Hospital (GOSH) is to become the first hospital in the UK to offer a pioneering cancer therapy, known as CAR-T therapy, to NHS patients with B-cell acute lymphoblastic leukaemia (ALL). The first patients begin treatment at GOSH this week. CAR-T therapies are specifically tailored for individual patients and work by harnessing the patient’s own immune system to fight cancer. In a complex manufacturing process, immune cells are taken from a patient’s blood and reprogrammed to specifically target and kill cancer cells. ALL is a severe form of leukaemia that affects around 600 people per year, most of whom are children between the age of 2 and 5 years. Although the outlook for children with ALL has dramatically improved over the last decade, 10–15% of patients still do not respond to standard treatments. The new therapy has been shown to be effective in treating patients with particularly aggressive or relapsed cancers, where other treatments have failed. Read more