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The Kaiya Foundation
The announcement is being made ahead of the start of September, which is Childhood Cancer Awareness Month and Blood Cancer Awareness Month. It also coincides with what would have been Kaiya Patel’s 13th birthday on 2nd September, and in whose memory the Foundation has been set up.
Kaiya was just five years old when she was diagnosed with a rare and aggressive leukaemia. Despite her extraordinary resilience and a treatment journey that inspired thousands, Kaiya succumbed to her condition in January 2019. Her parents established The Kaiya Foundation in her memory, determined to accelerate research and improve outcomes for children facing similar devastating diagnoses.
The award from the Kaiya Foundation will fund pioneering research into the fundamental cause of a high-risk leukaemia. The grant is being made to Dr Emily Neil and Professor Anindita Roy, in the hope that their discoveries will transform treatment approaches for sufferers through personalised medicine.
"This research is a vital step forward in understanding how leukaemia originates and evolves at the cellular level," said Professor Anindita Roy, whose group is based at the Department of Paediatrics and the MRC Molecular Haematology Unit at the University of Oxford. "Our goal is not only to detect these changes earlier, but to predict and eventually prevent them - offering new hope to families facing the most aggressive forms of leukaemia."
Dr Emily Neil added:
With the support of The Kaiya Foundation, we have a unique opportunity to move beyond standard treatments and create therapies that are tailored to the genetic and molecular profile of each patient's disease.