Welcome to the Elephant Trust For
Cancer Research
 
New e mail address as from September 2005 jennybod@westnet.com.au
Another £4,000 for the research
The following information was sent to me by Professor Stephen Mackinnon of the

The following information was sent to me by Professor Stephen Mackinnon of the

Department of Haematology

Royal Free and University College London Medical School

Professor Stephen Mackinnon is a wonderful man who is working tirelessly to find ways to help cancer patients.

 

He kindly sent this explanation to me to put in layman's terms what is being done to help patients who have cancers like Non Hodgkinson’s Lymphoma. The work of the Elephant Trust is to help in donating money to the ongoing research to help people to be well again. We are sending another cheque, this time for £4,000.00 which is money raised in Guernsey for the Trust.

 

17th June 2003

 

Allogeneic (using a donor other than the patient - usually a brother/sister or an unrelated donor) transplantation has been a very dangerous procedure until fairly recently.

 

This was because that conventionally patients received very high-dose chemotherapy and/or radiotherapy prior to the transplant - this treatment is called the "conditioning therapy". The dose of this treatment was designed to be as high as possible without causing irreversible damage to the normal organs such as the lungs, gut etc. The conditioning therapy needs to do 2 things: 1. kill the tumour cells and 2. suppress the immune system of the patient to prevent rejection of the donor bone marrow or stem cells. These very high doses were needed to kill as many tumour cells as possible e.g. lymphoma, and therefore increase the chances of long-term cure. Some patients, however, were unable to tolerate these very intensive treatments and died of complications of the transplant procedure rather than their underlying malignancy. This was especially common in older patients, those needing transplants from unrelated donors and in patients who had previously received high-dose therapy such as autologous stem cell transplantation. Because of these very high procedure-related mortalities, these patients were usually not eligible for this potentially curative procedure.

 

Around 10-15 yrs ago, it became clear that many patients who received an allogeneic transplant were cured not just by the conditioning therapy but by the new donor immune system that they were given along with the stem cells at the time of transplant. There are many types of immune cells, but one kind called "T cells" which in normal individuals combat viral infections, can, following a transplant, attack and destroy any malignant cells that were not killed by the conditioning therapy. This activity of the donor T cells is variously called the graft-versus-tumour or Graft-Versus-Leukaemia/lymphoma effect or GVL.

 

So around 5-6 yrs ago a small number of transplant centres in the world (including us) started doing transplants in a different way. The idea was to give much less intensive conditioning therapy which would allow many more patients to survive the transplant procedure - there is no doubt that this has made the transplant procedure easier for patients and have dramatically reduced the mortality of the procedure. These transplants have been called "mini-transplants" or "non-myeloablative transplants" or "reduced intensity transplants". Many patients who were ineligible for transplant can now be treated successfully. The treatment still allows to donor graft to take and therefore prevent rejection, but because it is much less intensive, it does not cure the underlying malignancy by itself and cure is obtained by the donor T cells which can be given either with the transplant or many months after the transplant. We have given T cells to many patients who have had one of these transplants for lymphoma and who relapsed following this new procedure - following the T cells transfusion (which is like have a simple blood transfusion from the donor in out-patients) many, though unfortunately not all patients, have gone back into remission. We now have many patients who failed chemotherapy and an autologous stem cell transplant who are now 4-5 years out from their "mini-transplant" who are well and in remission.

 

One of the crucial issues in dealing with these patients is to know which patients need to be given the donor T cells after the transplant. We decide this on a number of ways including testing the blood or marrow of the patient to look for small amounts of lymphoma (as little as one lymphoma cell in a million normal cells) using a very sophisticated lab technique called PCR (polymerase chain reaction). The PCR tests let us know which patients need the donor T cells and how many also how many donor T cell transfusions are required. Buying the PCR machine to do this critical analysis was only possible with the help of the Elephant Trust. So although it all sounds like scientific mumbo-jumbo, these lab tests are directly affecting patient care and the likelihood of a successful outcome for the patient and their family.

 

Professor Stephen Mackinnon of the

Department of Haematology

Royal Free and University College London Medical School

 
October 2002 Fund raising at the WI in Headley Surrey
Over £500 was raised by W

Over £500 was raised by W.I. members in a small village called Headley Nr Epsom in Surrey two weeks ago.

They had many stalls and people brought things to be sold. The event was a great success and many thanks go out to the W.I. for their support and encouragement. Well done and congratulations on a great effort.

Special thanks go to Mrs Rose Bodnarchuk, John’s mother for the sterling work she put in getting it organised.
Latest Fund Update 09/02/2002
Latest Fund Update 09


 
They now have reached over £47,500 as of Saturday, February 09, 2002

We have run discos and three Balls with great plans for more fun fund raising to come.

The last ball was on 31st May 2002 at the St. Pierre Park Hotel in St. Peter Port Guernsey

Tickets were £35.00

jennybod@guernsey.net

The current project is to raise money for our local cancer treatment section of our hospital the Princess Elizabeth Hospital in Guernsey. It is known as Bulstrode House. Cancer patients receiving chemotherapy are treated here and they need new equipment to help make the patients time there as comfortable as possible. So at the next ball we will be doing our best for our local cancer patients.

John in April 1999

Click for larger view
Untitled This is John in April 1999

He looked so well you couldn't imagine that really he was very ill and only had a few more months to live.

My wish is to raise this money so that others can carry on living and enjoying life.

Help me to make a difference in the world. Life is for living and caring for each other, giving and taking the time to be kind, thoughtful, generous and thinking what can I do, not what can the world give me.

John always had time for other people who needed his help.

He was a banker, but also an intensely humanitarian man who took the time to care for others. Because of his incredible warmth and caring nature he has generated enormous respect, and therefore support in what we are trying to do now to further the knowledge of cancer treatment and make peoples lives better.

You can help too if you want to.

If you e-mail me at jennybod@guernsey.net I can tell you where to send any donations for the Trust.
Stephen MacKinnon
Untitled I had a message from Stephen MacKinnon who is the consultant involved in the new research that we are helping to fund. This is what he said.

"Let me tell you what we are going to do with the money. I have just arranged to buy a state-of-the-art PCR machine to allow us to detect very small amounts of leukaemia and lymphoma - it cost £70,000!!! Without the money from The Elephant Trust, we would not have been able to buy this new research equipment. It will make a big difference to the transplant patients and we hope it will allow us to optimise their treatment by the end of this year. (2000) I have attached a brief document explaining what the machine will be used for."

The following is an explanation of what the PCR machine is and does. ACCURATE MEASUREMENT OF LEUKAEMIA AND LYMPHOMA USING STATE-OF-THE-ART MOLECULAR TECHNIQUES FACILITATED BY THE ABI / PRISM 7700 PCR MACHINE

Stephen Mackinnon MD.

We have developed a safer way of doing allogeneic (sibling or unrelated) bone marrow transplants. Instead of giving very high doses of chemotherapy and radiotherapy, which can be dangerous for the patient, we give lower doses of chemotherapy alone. This lower dose or mini transplant is much less toxic to the patient and is therefore much safer. Because the patient receives lower doses of treatment before the transplant, the procedure alone is much less likely to lead to cure of leukaemia or lymphoma. Eradication of disease is achieved by the use of donor blood transfusions many months after the transplant. These blood transfusions contain immune blood cells from the donor, which recognise the surviving leukaemia, or lymphoma cells from the patient as "foreign". These tumour cells are attacked and killed by the donor immune cells in a process that is called the graft-versus-leukaemia or graft-versus-lymphoma (GVL) effect. These donor immune cells can also cause complications such as graft-versus-host disease where the immune donor cells attack normal organs in the patient. The longer the donor blood infusions are delayed after transplant, the less likely it is that patients will develop graft-versus-host disease, however if they are delayed too long the leukaemia or lymphoma will relapse. What we require is a sensitive method of accurately measuring the amount of leukaemia or lymphoma remaining after transplant. This can be done with a technique called the polymerase chain reaction or PCR. With this technique we can detect one tumour cell in a million normal cells. To allow the donor blood transfusions to be given at the right time we need to know not only if there are leukaemia or lymphoma cells present but exactly how many there are and whether they are increasing or decreasing after the transplant. This can be done by using quantitative PCR. Until recently quantitative PCR was a very time consuming technique which was too cumbersome for individual patient management, however with the introduction of the ABI / Prism 7700 PCR machine the technique has been simplified. We intend to use this machine to monitor our patients after transplant to determine the best time to give the donor blood infusions. The aim will be to obtain the beneficial graft-versus-leukaemia / lymphoma effect whilst preventing the harmful graft-versus-host disease.
 
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