This World Cancer Day, find out more about how our research projects are revolutionising cancer therapies and saving lives.
Here at CRIS, we know that investing in research is the only way we can hope to beat cancer.
That’s why 95% of the money we raise goes straight into projects across the UK and Europe – projects to develop therapies that could change the way we treat certain types of cancer forever.
And these projects are already changing lives.
Towards the end of last year, the CRIS Unit for Research and Advanced Therapies, based at the Hospital de la Paz in Madrid, made a huge breakthrough.
The Unit, which has been working on an immunotherapy treatment that uses advanced CAR-T cells to treat childhood cancers, developed a therapy that, in simple terms, involves ‘teaching’ a cancer patient’s own T cells – healthy cells that are able to move around the body and fight infection – to recognise and attack the cancerous cells.
CAR-T treatments like these offer a real alternative for those with blood cancers like leukaemia. Essentially, they involve extracting healthy white blood cells (lymphocytes) from a patient’s own immune system, and then modifying them in a lab so that they can then be used against the cancerous cells.
This is an unconventional treatment and, of course, it is difficult work. But recently, the Unit made a major breakthrough – and because of that breakthrough, another young patient is cancer-free.
A year after arriving at the Unit, one 11-year-old boy who had been suffering from B-Cell Acute Lymphoblastic Leukaemia (B-ALL) was able to go home, in full remission from his cancer. That the treatment relied in part on his own white blood cells makes his recovery all the more remarkable – and it would not have been possible without the CRIS-funded Unit for Research and Advanced Therapies, headed up by Dr. Antonio Perez.
So that’s one more life saved, because of research.
And we don’t want to stop there. With your help, we can fund more research projects. Projects like Brain Tumours in Children, in partnership with the Institute of Cancer Research in London. Our researchers are working to validate a genetic test for brain tumours which could then be implemented throughout Europe. Such a tool would be just as life-changing, because it would give doctors so much more information and allow them to tailor treatments for their patients.
These are just a couple of the projects your donations help to fund – there is so much more we can do. And all it takes is ONE MORE person to support us.
ONE MORE donation, ONE MORE researcher, ONE MORE doctor: they could all add up to ONE MORE LIFE.
So will you help us?
Be one more. Donate here.