NEW YORK, United States – An eight-year-old American has become the world’s youngest
recipient of a transplant of both hands, Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia announced
Tuesday.
Surgeons operated for 10 hours to carry out the incredibly complicated surgery on Baltimore
native Zion Harvey.
He previously had both his hands and feet amputated and had a kidney transplant following a
major infection.
The smiling, precocious youngster had learned to eat, write and even play video games
without hands.
Now he says he is looking forward to being able to throw a football with his own hands.
It took a team of 40 doctors, nurses and other staff from plastic and reconstructive
surgery, orthopedic surgery, anesthesiology and radiology, to pull off the pioneering
surgery.
Surgeons first painstakingly attached bone, then veins. Once the blood was circulating,
surgeons connected tendons, muscles and nerves.
Cancer therapy is 2013 breakthrough – Science journal
WASHINGTON – A way of fighting cancer that turns the body’s immune
cells into targeted tumor killers was named the breakthrough of the year
by the US journal Science on Thursday.
Immunotherapy has only worked for a small number of patients, and
only in certain cancers, including melanoma and leukemia, but experts
believe its promise is huge.
“Oncologists, a grounded-in-reality bunch, say a corner has been turned and we won’t be going back,” said the journal Science.
Research began in the late 1980s when French scientists
discovered a receptor on T-cells, called CTLA-4, a molecule that turned
out to play an important role in regulating the immune system.
A decade later, a Texas researcher showed that blocking CTLA-4 in
mice “could unleash T-cells against tumor cells in the animals,
shrinking them dramatically,” the journal said.
More advances have followed. In the 1990s, a biologist in Japan
discovered a molecule expressed in dying T-cells, called PD-1, which has
also shown promise in the fight against cancer.
As many as five big pharmaceutical companies are now on board
with immunotherapy. A new drug made by Bristol Myers-Squibb was approved
in 2011. Called ipilimumab, it costs $120,000 per treatment course.
It’s costly, and by no means a sure bet. Research in 2012 on a
group of 300 people showed the drug shrunk tumors by half or more in 31
percent of patients with melanoma, 29 percent with kidney cancer and 17
percent with lung cancer.
Research out this year on 1,800 people with melanoma who received ipilimumab, 22 percent were alive three years later.
A related treatment called chimeric antigen receptor therapy,
which involves modifying a patient’s own T-cells to make them attack
tumors, has succeeded in putting 45 of 75 people with leukemia in total
remission, researchers said this year.
One of those success stories is Emily Whitehead, now age eight.
Last year she became the first pediatric patient to receive the
experimental therapy for acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL).
“She is doing great. She is almost 20 months cancer free now. Her
health has just been wonderful. She is completely back to normal, back
to school full time,” her mother, Kari, told AFP.
Emily was at the brink of death, and after two relapses doctors admitted they had no options.
Their hope was suddenly revived when her family learned about the experimental T-cell therapy and agreed to try it.
“There just wasn’t anything left for her,” her mother said. “This
treatment has just been amazing for Emily and for all the other
families who were told the same thing.”
The journal Science and its publisher, the American Association
for the Advancement of Science, pointed to other key achievements in its
annual top 10 breakthroughs issue.
