NATIONAL NEWS - A six-year-old South African girl will be the first from the African continent to undergo a new cancer treatment known as CAR T-cell (Chimeric antigen receptor) therapy.
Mia Cara Ferreira has been battling from acute lymphoblastic leukaemia since 2015 and relapsed earlier this year.
The child's father Joseph Ferreira says: “It would mean a lot more if the therapy could come to South Africa or Africa as a whole.
"We are desperately in need of something like this because there are many kids who relapse who don’t have access to this.”
Unlike conventional chemotherapy, CAR T-cell therapy is a gene-editing treatment by which the patient's own cells are harvested and re-engineered to act as ''killing machines'' within the body.
