For the first time in Louisiana, a child has been functionally cured of sickle cell disease. Phillip Mullin, a 15-year-old from Alexandria, was celebrated at a ceremony on Friday, October 23, at Manning Family Children’s Hospital in New Orleans, where he received the gene therapy that changed his life.

Mullin is also the first person in Louisiana to be treated with Lyfgenia, a gene therapy that uses a patient’s own stem cells to help the body make healthy red blood cells.

Sickle cell disease causes red blood cells to become stiff and crescent-shaped, which can block blood flow and lead to severe pain, infections and stroke. Over the course of his young life, Mullin had been hospitalized more than 100 times.

His mother, Shataka Figgins, said that bringing her son home means letting go of years of fear, sleepless nights and moments when she wondered how much more his body could take. Now, she said, she gets to see the young man who made it through.

At the ceremony, Mullin delivered a speech that brought much of the room to tears. He spoke about the sacrifices his treatment required and the strength it built in him, and he called his sister, Paige, his superhero, describing her as the greatest gift God ever gave him.

Mullin isn’t stopping at being cured. He wants as many people with sickle cell disease as possible to have access to gene therapy, and he plans to become a hematologist-oncologist, a doctor who treats blood disorders and cancer.

“I want to be a doctor that can relate to somebody,” he said, explaining that he wants patients to know their doctor truly understands what they’re going through. For now, though, he’s looking forward to sleeping in his own bed and building Legos with his baby sister.

His milestone comes just four months after another Louisiana first. In June, New Orleans resident Daniel Cressy became the first person in the state to be functionally cured of sickle cell disease after receiving gene therapy at what was then Children’s Hospital New Orleans. Cressy had lived with the disease his entire life, and his recovery offered new hope to families across the state.

Together, their stories show how quickly the outlook for sickle cell patients is changing. The disease disproportionately affects Black Americans: about 1 in 365 Black babies in the United States is born with it.

Gene therapies like Lyfgenia and Casgevy are offering something that once seemed out of reach for the families living with it.