PLEASE NOTE DATE CHANGED TO 22ND SEPTEMBER 2022

Why are we doing this?

Remarkable medical breakthroughs have
been made by the doctors and research teams at Great Ormond Street Hospital for
Children and their colleagues in other research institutes, but the need for
research funds remains desperate. 

The bone marrow unit and cellular
research teams cannot afford to do much of the work that requires them to
collaborate with industry colleagues that is crucial to taking their work
forward.  By directing funds from the OSCAR Campaign appropriately, we
help them to do that.

Oscar is now 23.  Fifteen years
on from the experimental treatments that saved his life and that have saved the
lives of others since him, he is employed full time as a chef, cooking banquets
in the livery halls of the City of London. Good news stories like Oscar's
really are only possible thanks to fundraising that enables research to go
beyond the funding available from the public purse.

About the OSCAR Campaign:

The OSCAR Campaign raises funds
towards areas of urgent need at Great Ormond Street Hospital and its research
partner, the UCL Institute of Child Health. The campaign is raising money to
support priority areas of research which will improve children’s lives
worldwide.

The campaign is led by Phil Parry,
Chairman of Spinnaker Global, whose son Oscar was diagnosed with leukaemia at
just three years old. Oscar received three life-saving transplants at GOSH, one
of which was a ground-breaking stem cell transplant. He is living proof of the
importance of pioneering research. Had he been in the same situation a year
earlier, it is unlikely he would have survived.

Thank you for your support

Latest Developments

The OSCAR Campaign has recently
approved direction of some of its fundraising towards CAR T cell therapy, which
involves genetically engineering the patient's immune cells to fight against
leukaemia. This approach has been remarkably successful in patients with
otherwise incurable acute lymphoblastic leukaemia (including many that have
relapsed after bone marrow transplatation (BMT)) and is now an NHS-approved
treatment for such children. In 2021 GOSH treated over 20 children with this
approach on the BMT unit. The problem is that while almost all patients respond
initially, around half will relapse and this often because the patient loses
circulating CAR T cells for reasons we don’t really understand. The
OSCAR-supported three-year Fellowship will fund research to investigate why
some patients lose their CAR T cells and the reasons for this. Understanding
this will enable the design of strategies to make CAR T cells persist in all
patients and hence prevent relapse after CAR T cell therapy. This is a really
exciting project and if it’s successful it will save lives.