A while ago, I took a sabbatical from my job in the Cancer Research UK comms team. On my first day back, I bumped into one of our senior clinicians in the corridor - a man normally given to neither hype nor hyperbole - and asked him if anything big had happened while i'd been away. 

He said, "You know what? This immunotherapy lark looks like it might actually work!" 

Immunotherapy for cancer is one of the most exciting things to have happened in medical research in my lifetime. In patients for whom the drugs work, they can really, really  work. People given months to live can be alive and well years later. 

But there's a catch. They don't yet work for everyone, they yet don't work in every form of cancer, and they still have some pretty grim side effects. So there's still years more research to be done, and many puzzles to be solved, to make them more effective, and help as many people as possible.

Cancer Research UK has a specific funding scheme to support research aimed at understanding how to harness the immune system's ability to target cancer. And through a special arrangement, the funds raised on my page, including the Gift Aid, will be used to help them fund the CRUK Immunology Awards. These grants are aimed at bringing in immunologists from outside the cancer research field to focus their expertise on cancer - something that's going to be crucial in future progress.

Please be as generous as you can. This stuff's important.

Thank you.

Henry x