Abbie Shaw was just 21 months old when she was diagnosed with neuroblastoma, a cancer that starts in the nervous system. For someone so small and so young, Abbie was exceptionally brave as she underwent intensive treatment to fight her cancer.

She had operations, multiple rounds of high-dose chemotherapy, a stem cell transplant, immunotherapy, radiotherapy and other hard hitting treatments. She had periods of being cancer-free but ultimately none of the treatments were successful for long. She died aged just five years old.

Had Abbie been an adult and suffering from another form of cancer, she might have been treated using therapies that target the specific gene causing her cancer. Unfortunately she wasn’t as those treatments don’t yet exist for childhood cancers.

We currently know far less about the causes of childhood cancers like neuroblastoma than we do about some adult cancers, and that’s why they’re so hard to treat effectively. But Professor Louis Chesler and his team are determined to change that by studying the biological alterations that drive the cancer’s development.

With this knowledge, he will be able to discover new treatments – or identify existing ones from those already used for adults – that would be much more effective against neuroblastoma, or maybe even stop it developing completely.

Thank you so much for your support.

Please help to support Professor Chesler's work