Personalised drug for aggressive leukaemia on NHS

Patients with an aggressive form of leukaemia will be able to receive a breakthrough immunotherapy on the NHS that saw over three quarters of patients go into remission in trials. The CAR T-cell therapy – known as ‘obe-cel’ – involves taking a patient’s immune cells and reprogramming them in a lab to identify and target their cancer, before returning them to the body as living medicine. NHS England has announced that the personalised therapy would be available on the NHS within weeks through specialist centres.