Gok Wan said a new treatment that has put his 13-year-old family member’s cancer in remission is a “Christmas miracle”.
The fashion guru, best known for How To Look Good Naked, has previously spoken publicly about Alyssa, his cousin’s daughter, being diagnosed with leukaemia.
The 48-year-old presenter told This Morning on Wednesday how it has felt to have her selected for the gene therapy treatment called Car-T cell therapy after various other treatments failed to help.
He said: “You get given…the most awful news about Alyssa and it just continues and gets worse and worse and worse and after treatment and transplants and everything else, and then all of a sudden to get the news that actually science has ‘cured’ the leukaemia.
“It has been so shocking and mind blowing…You prepare for the worst as it becomes a way of dealing with what’s going on.”
Last year, he raised more than £50,000 for charity Young Lives Vs Cancer by getting his head shaved live on the ITV show.
Alyssa’s mother Kiona said, “Alyssa was diagnosed a year and a half ago and she has a very common childhood leukaemia but unfortunately conventional medicines didn’t work.
“She had the chemotherapy, she had her first bone marrow transplant (and radiotherapy) none of it worked.
“Nothing could get rid of the leukaemia…It was really tough time…and we spoke to the consultants and they said ‘the only option now really was palliative care’.
“They said ‘anything we try now will be research or new. We can’t guarantee if she’ll survive it or if it’ll work’.”
On wanting to try the treatment, Alyssa said, “If it wouldn’t help me it would help somebody else, but also it was another chance for me as well and then even just doing it, it would make such a difference to the world, even if I didn’t survive it, again, my life then would have had a meaning.”
The treatment uses someone’s own immune cells, known as T-cells, to destroy cancerous ones.
Kiona added: “At the moment, she is completely Leukaemia free.”
She also said: “On the day of the transplant…they came with this tiny little syringe and it was over in three minutes…and it had millions and millions of cells in that were going to go in and fight her leukaemia – which it did.
“It took 28 days…she was very poorly (in hospital during that time).
“(The medical staff said then) ‘we think we’ve managed to get it it all, she can now go for her bone marrow transplant’ her second one.”
Wan said: “It’s just a miracle, you cannot get your head around it can you?
“The success of this is just it’s so incredible and it’s so wonderful for science because it means we’re walking and stepping and hopefully leaping in the right direction, because of course as we know, there are millions of people, millions of families around the world going through what we’ve gone through as a family and this gives hope.”
This Morning airs weekdays from 10am on ITV1 and ITV Hub.
