A £1.65 million treatment has been approved for use for some NHS patients, offering some with an inherited blood disorder hope of a cure. Professor of paediatric sickle cell disease David Rees welcomed the decision, calling it a "momentous day". Report by Kennedyl. Like us on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/itn and follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/itn
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00:00One day on a series of other fairly momentous days, where NICE have agreed that this treatment
00:06should be available on the NHS, that potentially or actually curative treatment using gene
00:12editing is now available free to patients on the NHS, which is the first gene editing
00:19treatment approved in the UK.
00:21It's not, technically it's not really a cure in that they still, patients still have sickle
00:25cell disease, they still have lots of sickle haemoglobin around, but the editing alters
00:30the way haemoglobin is made, so you also make lots of haemoglobin that doesn't sickle called
00:35foetal haemoglobin, and that increases enough to dilute out the effect of the sickle.
00:40So patients who've had this treatment are more or less symptom free, and the trials
00:44that have been done, and the patient have been followed up for a few years, they're
00:48completely well, they don't get any of the problems that patients with sickle is.
00:52So it's a sort of functional cure, if not a technical cure.