{"id":294137,"date":"2026-02-12T11:59:12","date_gmt":"2026-02-12T11:59:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/294137\/"},"modified":"2026-02-12T11:59:12","modified_gmt":"2026-02-12T11:59:12","slug":"time100-health-waseem-qasim-and-alyssa-tapley","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/294137\/","title":{"rendered":"TIME100 Health: Waseem Qasim and Alyssa Tapley"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"rich-text self-baseline font-graphik text-body-large text-black-coffee mb-0 focus-visible:outline focus-visible:outline-black-coffee focus-visible:outline-2 focus-visible:outline-offset-2 focus-visible:shadow-focus-color text-left\" data-testid=\"paragraph-content\">In 2022, Alyssa Tapley, then 13, was told that her cancer\u2014a form of T-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia\u2014was terminal. As a last resort, she enrolled in a clinical trial at the U.K.\u2019s Great Ormond Street Hospital that involved tailoring donor immune cells to attack cancer using base editing\u2014a new type of gene editing that allows for faster, more precise changes, says Waseem Qasim, the trial\u2019s leader and a professor of cell and gene therapy at University College London. That year, Tapley became the world\u2019s first patient to receive a base-edited cell therapy. The response, detailed in a New England Journal of Medicine <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nejm.org\/doi\/full\/10.1056\/NEJMoa2505478\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">study<\/a> in December, was remarkable. Tapley has been in remission for three years after a successful bone marrow transplant and plans to pursue a career in cancer research; the trial\u2019s 10 other patients also saw a substantial reduction in disease, with eight others in remission deep enough to enable bone marrow transplants, too.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In 2022, Alyssa Tapley, then 13, was told that her cancer\u2014a form of T-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia\u2014was terminal.&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":294138,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[47092,9810,103,397,396,61,60,28976,709,47094,12277,139977],"class_list":{"0":"post-294137","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-healthcare","8":"tag-accolades","9":"tag-franchise","10":"tag-health","11":"tag-health-care","12":"tag-healthcare","13":"tag-ie","14":"tag-ireland","15":"tag-list","16":"tag-magazine","17":"tag-special-project","18":"tag-sponsorshipblock","19":"tag-time100-health-2026"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/294137","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=294137"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/294137\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/294138"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=294137"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=294137"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=294137"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}