An 18-month-old girl from Oxfordshire has had her hearing restored after becoming the first person in the world to take part in a groundbreaking new gene therapy trial.
He said, “We have results from which are very spectacular – so close to normal hearing restoration. So we do hope it could be a potential cure.” "When she first turned, I couldn’t believe it,” said Mrs Sandy, "I thought it was a fluke or like a change in light or something that had caught her eye, but I repeated it a few times.“
"She’s definitely responding more to sort of what we would call functional sounds rather than just sounds that we use to test her.“ A second child has also received the gene therapy treatment at Cambridge University Hospitals, with positive results seen recently, six weeks after surgery. The toddler is the first patient globally to receive the Regeneron therapy and “she’s the youngest globally that’s been done to date as far as we know,” Prof Bance said.