A 10-year-old girl who has been battling leukemia for more than four years has become the first person in Taiwan to be successfully treated with a new form of immunotherapy, doctors at National Taiwan University Hospital (NTUH) said yesterday.
The child, identified only as Ting-ting (亭亭), was diagnosed with pediatric B-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia at the age of six and was initially receiving targeted chemotherapy, her doctors told a news conference.
When her leukemia recurred last year, doctors recommended the CD19 chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapy — a immunotherapy treatment that was introduced in the past decade and had never previously been used successfully to treat a person with leukemia in Taiwan.
Photo: Chiu Chih-jou, Taipei Times
After an infusion of CD19 CAR T-cells in April, Ting-ting’s cancer went into complete remission, the doctors said, adding that she was recently able to spend her 10th birthday at home with her family.
CAR T therapies became prominent in 2012, when they were successfully used in a clinical trial to treat Emily Whitehead, a six-year-old American girl who had been diagnosed with leukemia.
In such therapies, immune cells called T-cells are taken from a patient’s blood and modified by adding a gene for a CAR, which helps them attach to the specific cancer cell antigen. They are then put back in the patient.
Ting-ting’s mother recalled the difficulty she had in explaining the cancer diagnosis to such a young child, telling the news conference that she eventually told her daughter it was “like having a cold” and would get better if she took her medicine.
She thanked her daughter’s medical team for discussing with her the option of CAR T-cell therapy, which she said allowed them to begin the treatment as soon as Ting-ting’s cancer recurred.
Cancer is the second-leading cause of death among children in Taiwan and leukemia accounts for a significant proportion, said Lee Wang-tso (李旺祚), director of NTUH’s Department of Pediatrics.
In the past, the options for treating pediatric leukemia have been limited mainly to chemotherapy, which can cause adverse reactions, and bone marrow transplants, which are difficult to arrange and sometimes require the patient to take immunosuppressant drugs indefinitely, Lee said.
Jou Shiann-tang (周獻堂), a doctor in the hospital’s Department of Hematology and Oncology, said that about 500 new pediatric leukemia cases are diagnosed in Taiwan each year.
About one-quarter of them are acute lymphoblastic leukemia and about 15 percent of such patients have adverse reactions to treatment or the cancer recurs, Jou said.
Ting-ting’s parents said that the CD19 CAR T-cell therapy has the potential to help other children.
However, the treatment is not covered by the National Health Insurance, which meant that they had to sell their home to pay the NT$10 million (US$334,571) it cost.
The National Health Insurance Administration is reviewing whether to cover such treatments in the future, the hospital said.
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) yesterday voiced dissatisfaction with the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans- Pacific Partnership (CPTPP), whose latest meeting, concluded earlier the same day, appeared not to address the country’s application. In a statement, MOFA said the CPTPP commission had "once again failed to fairly process Taiwan’s application," attributing the inaction to the bloc’s "succumbing to political pressure," without elaborating. Taiwan submitted its CPTPP application under the name "Separate Customs Territory of Taiwan, Penghu, Kinmen and Matsu" on Sept. 22, 2021 -- less than a week after China
THE GOOD WORD: More than 100 colleges on both sides of the Pacific will work together to bring students to Taiwan so they can learn Mandarin where it is spoken A total of 102 universities from Taiwan and the US are collaborating in a push to promote Taiwan as the first-choice place to learn Mandarin, with seven Mandarin learning centers stood up in the US to train and support teachers, the Foundation for International Cooperation in Higher Education of Taiwan (FICHET) said. At the annual convention of the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages held over the weekend in New Orleans, Louisiana, a Taiwan Pavilion was jointly run by 17 representative teams from the FICHET, the Overseas Community Affairs Council, the Steering Committee for the Test of Proficiency-Huayu, the
A home-style restaurant opened by a Taiwanese woman in Quezon City in Metro Manila has been featured in the first-ever Michelin Guide honoring exceptional restaurants in the Philippines. The restaurant, Fong Wei Wu (豐味屋), was one of 74 eateries to receive a “Michelin Selected” honor in the guide, while one restaurant received two Michelin stars, eight received one star and 25 were awarded a “Bib Gourmand.” The guide, which was limited to restaurants in Metro Manila and Cebu, was published on Oct. 30. In an interview, Feng Wei Wu’s owner and chef, Linda, said that as a restaurateur in her 60s, receiving an
Kaohsiung Mayor Chen Chi-mai (陳其邁) on Monday announced light shows and themed traffic lights to welcome fans of South Korean pop group Twice to the port city. The group is to play Kaohsiung on Saturday as part of its “This Is For” world tour. It would be the group’s first performance in Taiwan since its debut 10 years ago. The all-female group consists of five South Koreans, three Japanese and Tainan’s Chou Tzu-yu (周子瑜), the first Taiwan-born and raised member of a South Korean girl group. To promote the group’s arrival, the city has been holding a series of events, including a pop-up
RSS