Case study | Lorraine Lea IMPACT
2022-03-07
We’d like to say a huge thank you to Lorraine Lea for their generous committed support of The Kids’ Cancer Project over the past four years.
Every year funds raised by Lorraine Lea have gone towards the Zero Childhood Cancer Program to help children who would otherwise have no hope.
Cancer remains the biggest killer of kids from disease in Australia. Zero Childhood Cancer is Australia's first precision medicine program treating children who have been given less than a 30% chance of surviving their cancer diagnosis.
Led by Children's Cancer Institute and Kids Cancer Centre at Sydney Children's Hospital, Randwick, ZERO brings together all major Australian clinical and research centres working in childhood cancer as well as international collaborations.
Since its national clinical trial launched in September 2017, more than 500 children and young people with high-risk cancer have been enrolled. For over 70% of these patients, the program has successfully identified a personalised treatment plan to target the specific genetic changes driving their unique cancer, in under nine weeks.
Owen Finegan, CEO of The Kids’ Cancer Project said the latest efforts of the Lorraine Lea community would allow more seriously ill Australian children to enrol in Zero Childhood Cancer's ground-breaking program.
Because Zero Childhood Cancer identifies the unique genetic changes of each individual child’s cancer, specific drugs can be identified to treat the disease.
It is no longer a one size fits all remedy; it is about personalised treatment plans.
- Owen Finegan, CEO The Kids' Cancer Project
This program is at the heart of The Kids’ Cancer Project’s mission – it’s all about improving every child’s chance for survival while minimising the effects of aggressive and unsuccessful treatments. By supporting this program, the Lorraine Lea community is giving new hope to families and children going through the unimaginable.
We want 100% of children diagnosed with cancer to have the opportunity to access personalised cancer treatment plans, and with this year’s donation, along with the incredible work from the funding, research and clinical partners, that will be possible.
Read more: Zero: Our best hope yet.
Ellie is cancer free!
Ellie was 11 months old when she was admitted to hospital with doctors finding a tumour in her chest the size of a football. She began treatment as part of the Zero Childhood Cancer clinical trial and against all odds beat the cancer.
Ellie’s terrified parents Mina and Rob were told their daughter would not live to see her first birthday after they were given the news that the rare cancer, she was diagnosed with was resistant to chemotherapy.
But thanks to the team at the Children’s Cancer Institute and the Kids Cancer Centre at Sydney Children’s Hospital, Ellie is now thriving and celebrating turning five after a trial drug literally proved to be a lifesaver.
We went from having a child that couldn’t breathe, intubated and in the ICU unit to nine weeks later she was breathing, eating and crawling.
Read more: Ellie's story.
Ellie ... is now considered to be cancer free.
- Mina, Ellie's mum
This story originally appeared in the Geelong Advertiser.
Study news
The support of Lorraine Lea has enabled The Kids’ Cancer Project to continue funding one of the charity’s longest standing research studies to make enormous advances in achieving the vision of 100% survival of all children diagnosed with this devastating disease.
This strong partnership has contributed to the Zero Childhood Cancer Program achieving five milestones in the past twelve months.
- ZERO National Clinical Trial major milestone: enrolment of the 500th PRISM patient in April 2021. As of 23 August 2021, a total of 569 high-risk/relapsed + rare cancer patients were enrolled in the program with an average of recommendations issued for 74% of cases within 6.9 weeks.
- ZERO’s First major genomics landscape manuscript published in the prestigious Nature Medicine (Wong, Mayoh, Lau et al. “Whole genome, transcriptome and methylome profiling enhances actionable target discovery in high-risk paediatric cancer”) featured in Cancer Discovery News in Brief: “Pediatric Precision Medicine Study Impresses”.
- Collaboration with PeCan-PIE (Pathogenicity Information Exchange) platform at St Jude Children’s Research Hospital cloud: ZERO to upload published data and gain access to data from 5,000 samples.
- Opening of the Paediatric Cancer Predisposition Screening Program - PREDICT (Cancer PREDisposItion in Childhood by Trio-based sequencing) in NSW at Sydney Children’s Hospital, Randwick and Westmead. To date, a total of four trios (child, mum, dad) were enrolled in the program.
- Launch of ZERO monthly Seminar Series: Dr Raelene Endersby (Telethon Kids Institute, WA): Synergistic Therapeutic Strategies for Medulloblastoma.
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Get in touch
With thanks to the support of our partners we can continue to fund vital childhood cancer research. Contact our team today to see how we can work together.