Doctors successfully treat a teenager with leukaemia

An experimental treatment for leukaemia has left an English teenager free of the blood cancer after all conventional interventions failed to prevent a relapse of her disease. The thirteen-year-old is the first person globally to receive genetically modified donor cells that can hunt down and kill cancer with damaging healthy cells. The pioneering technique at a London hospital then enabled the girl to receive a bone marrow transplant to restore her depleted immune system. Doctors hope that further developments will lead to treatments for other forms of leukaemia.

Also in the programme: power shortages in Ukraine; and NASA’s Orion heads back to Earth.

Joining Celia Hatton to discuss these and other stories are Shahida Tulaganova, a British-Uzbek journalist and filmmaker based in London, and Marc David Baer, a professor of international history at the London School of Economics.

(Photo: Leukaemia blood cells. Credit: Science Photo Library)