Teenage girl becomes first child in Portugal to receive ‘innovative new therapy for leukemia

A 13-year-old girl has become the first child in Portugal to receive ‘innovative new immunotherapy’ for leukemia. The treatment, costing a reported €350,000, involves modifying cells and reintroducing them to the body to eliminate the cancerous tumors. The child received the therapy in December at Lisbon’s IPO hospital and is now “stable and without signs of the disease”. This new CAR-T therapy, as it is known, has a 90% success rate in early stages of leukemia and various other cancers.