T-cell leukaemia patients get experimental treatment lifeline

Therapy developed by NUS Medicine and NUHS has been tested on 17 people

- Ariel Yu

Mrs Hannah Thomas' life took an unexpected turn in March 2022 when a routine fertility test revealed she had T-cell acute lymphoblastic leukaemia, a rare type of blood cancer.

Rounds of chemotherapy and a bone marrow transplant offered the 32-year-old Australian only a brief respite. That was until an experimental treatment - CD7 CAR T-cell therapy developed by researchers and clinicians from the National University of Singapore eventually caused her cancer to go into remission.

CAR (chimeric antigen receptor) T-cell therapy involves genetically altering T-cells a type of white blood cells that help the body fight infections and diseases, including cancer - in a laboratory to kill cancer cells, before they are infused back into the patient.

CARS are artificial proteins which bind to specific proteins on cancer cells, helping immune cells to track down the cancer cells.

These CAR T-cells are highly effective at killing cancer cells, often within minutes. In the laboratory, they destroy 60 per cent of leukaemia cells in four hours, and 100 per cent within 24 hours.

Relating her story, Mrs Thomas, a senior policy officer at the New South Wales Ministry of Health, described how she and her then fiance, Simon, had to postpone their wedding when she suddenly found out she had cancer. It was the second postponement the first was because of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Six months of chemotherapy and a bone marrow transplant later, she went into remission, and they eventually tied the knot in May 2023. However, their joy was short-lived, as they discovered a month later during a bone marrow biopsy that the cancer had returned.

Running out of options in Australia, the couple was referred by their haematologist in St Vincent's Hospital Sydney to the Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine at the National University of Singapore (NUS Medicine) and the National University Health System (NUHS).