Since Jan 2008, Towergate Charitable Foundation
has been supporting Great Ormond Street Hospital (GOSH), the UK's
leading and best-loved children's hospital.
Every year more than 150,000 patient visits are made to GOSH
from children all over the world. Many of the children treated
suffer from rare, complex and often life threatening conditions
which are why GOSH continually have to research, develop and
pioneer new treatments and procedures in order to meet this
continuing challenge.
The projects Towergate are
supporting
Towergate have agreed to direct
all money raised from January 2008 to December 2010, towards
2 projects:
- Towergate has, by mid 2009, fully
funded the building of 2 isolation rooms within the new cardiac
ward. These are due for completion in 2012. The isolation rooms
will be used for children who have undergone major heart and lung
surgery, thus supporting the great work of surgeons. With your help
we can continue to help more children with heart problems recover
from such treatments and procedures.
- Supporting Dr Nick Goulden’s project ‘MRD guided
chemotherapy and bone marrow transplant in leukaemia’
details of which are explained below and is illustrated in Jake’s
video diary.
Clair Noctor, Clinical Nurse Specialist at the Cardiac
Intensive Care Unit told us:
"The cardiac intensive care unit's isolation rooms are used to
nurse children who are at high risk of infection - for example
children who have had a heart or lung transplant, or for children
that have or may have an infection - such as Chickenpox or MRSA
- and are therefore at risk of passing it onto other
children.
Any child who needs to be looked after on an Intensive Care Unit
is vulnerable to infection. The Isolation rooms help to minimise
risk. Isolation rooms are an integral to our patients'
treatments and without the financial support of people, like the
management, staff and clients of Towergate, some of our most
vulnerable children would not survive"
Tackling leukaemia early with
therapies targeted to fight minimal residual disease
(MRD)
The continued improvement in survival rates
for children with leukaemia seen over the past 40 years has
resulted from the use of increasingly intensive treatment. It
is now recognised that many of those cured with modern chemotherapy
are probably being over treated. Nevertheless, a number of
children relapse and leukaemia remains the commonest cause of death
from cancer in childhood.
Curing childhood leukaemia therefore requires
a delicate balance between the potential toxic effects of therapy
and effective control of the disease. Crucial to this process
is for doctors to know how much leukaemia is present - the more
leukaemic cells there are in a patient’s blood, the greater the
dose of therapy is needed to fight them off, and the larger the
potential side effects.
Jake’s story
Jake was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukaemia when he was
11. His incredible video diary shows just how hard he had to
fight to recover, while undergoing intensive chemotherapy to beat
the disease. Research that Towergate is funding at Great
Ormond Street Hospital will mean children like Jake could be given
a better chance of survival, with less intense chemotherapy.
View
Jake’s Video diary.
This video diary has been produced by Children First for Health
- Great Ormond Street Hospital’s general health information website
for young people of all ages and parents. http://www.childrenfirst.nhs.uk/
.jpg "Tim Milne") |
Dr Nick Goulden’s pioneering project will use the latest genetic
technology to measure tiny levels of minimal residual disease (MRD)
in children with acute leukaemia. Knowing exactly how much
disease is present will allow doctors to target the most intensive
treatment to only those patients who need it the most. It
will also allow treatment to be started earlier - tackling the
disease at a point when it is less likely to have taken hold.
Dr Goulden is assisted by Tim Milne, the Senior clinical scientist at the Institute of Child
Health.
Read a recent interview with Tim
Milne explaining the progress made.
|
Dr Nick Goulden and his fellow investigators
are national experts in their field. It is envisaged that
should the project be successful, within three years, the
techniques from the laboratory will be rolled out to a NHS-funded
protocol, influencing therapy for patients across the country and,
ultimately, around the world.
