Blood Cancer Awareness Month gives us an opportunity to raise awareness of the key issues affecting around 240,000 people in the UK living with a blood cancer and to highlight the services saves people’s lives.
Alex Hornby, who is in his mid-thirties and recently married, suddenly fell very unwell last June. “I was rushed to hospital and had emergency treatment”, said Alex. “I soon found out that I had non-Hodgkin's lymphoma.”
The conventional treatment for Alex was chemotherapy or if that didn’t work chemotherapy to send the cancer into remission and allow for a stem cell transplant. Neither was successful so Alex was told the devastating news that he had just months to live.
Alex was then referred to UCLH to have CAR- T Cell therapy – a non-conventional treatment whereby a patient's T cells (a type of immune system cell taken from the blood) are changed in the laboratory so they will attack cancer cells. Alex said that he immediately felt the “cancer going down” but anxiously waited for the month end scan.
The scan confirmed that the cancer was in remission. “I was absolutely overwhelmed - to go from being told to consider writing a will in January to complete remission in April is nothing short of a miracle - I even avoided having to go through chemo again which was very debilitating”.
We want to help more patients like Alex access advanced and life-saving cancer treatments like CAR- T Cell therapy. That’s why we’re raising funds for a new cancer and surgery centre at UCLH. The centre will provide world leading state-of-the-art treatment facilities including proton beam therapy, short stay surgery, a critical care unit, imaging services and a blood disorders treatment centre.
Your help is very much needed. Please click HERE to donate or read more about the facility.
