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The first patient to undergo a new and innovative treatment for sickle cell anemia is a 12 year old black kid from Washington
A new commercially Approved gene therapy designed to treat and potentially cure sickle cell disease has its first patient last Wednesday (May 1). Kendric Cromer, a black 12-year-old from a Washington suburb, began his first treatment administered by Bluebird Bio company at Children's National Hospital in the DC metro area. Treatment is important as blacks make up the majority of the 100,000 people in the United States who deal with the affliction, which is passed down through genetics from both parents and can cause debilitating and constant pain in addition to other problems such as low oxygen and jaundice.
The new treatment, known as Lyfgenia, it's exhausting, requiring Kendric to stay in the hospital for a month afterward just to recover from the extractive component of the treatment. He became the first to qualify after meeting the two main conditions – who was the sickest and who had the insurance. “We always prayed that this day would come,” Kendric's mother, Deborah Cromer, said during the interview with New York Times.
“We're nervous reading the consents and what's going to have to go through.” But for Kendric, who has suffered from the condition since age 3 resulting in five-day seizures and multiple emergency room visits, he was ready to undergo the rigorous procedure. “Sickle cell always steals my dreams and interrupts all the things I want to do,” she said. “I want to heal.”
The first step involved doctors removing Kendric's bone marrow stem cells after giving him a drug to remove them, known as plerixafor. The desired goal of the extraction is to take millions of stem cells over six to eight hours and then transfer them to a lab in Allendale, New Jersey, to add a healthy hemoglobin gene to correct the mutation that causes sickle cell disease. The modified cells would then be sent back and reintroduced into Kendric's bone marrow three months later.
The Lyfgenia gene therapy treatment has been touted as a revolutionary procedure and ranks near the top of the most expensive treatments in healthcare at $3.1 million. Bluebird Bio said that because of the time it takes to complete the treatment, it can only treat 85 to 100 patients a year.
