We are raising money for Infant Leukaemia research at GOSH, in memory of our beautiful son Enzo Saunt.

Enzo was diagnosed with Infant Leukaemia as a baby, and tragically passed away- aged two and a half earlier this year. Infant leukaemia (affecting babies diagnosed before the age of one), has been described as ‘A thorn in the side of a remarkable success story’. Although there have been incredible improvements for childhood leukaemia over the past twenty years - where survival rates are as high as 90%, the main type of leukaemia affecting babies, is still not well understood and remains hard to treat.

GOSH are looking to find a cure for this aggressive disease and find alternative treatments to the particularly high-dose chemotherapy used in its standard treatment, and also bone marrow transplants, which in themselves carry a 10-20% fatality rate for these patients.

During Enzo’s one and a half years of treatment he spent over 250 nights in hospital isolation, had more than 300 doses of chemotherapy, spent a month attached to a 24 hour immunotherapy pump, suffered organ damage, mouth sores, open nappy wounds (due to chemo coming out in the urine), had 40 unplanned visits to hospital when at home, received over 60 blood transfusions, had 30 general anaesthetics, a leukaemia relapse, and five emergency crash calls.

Enzo very, very sadly died during his bone marrow transplant, after contracting a common virus while his immune system hadn’t yet regenerated. Coming home without him during lockdown was an unimaginable experience for us, having just spent the previous seven weeks at GOSH trying to save his life.

Enzo was the bravest, funniest, dinosaur obsessed boy- whose favourite colour was brown (!), loved eating pasta, tickling, kicking footballs and reading our hoover manual at bedtime. We are beyond proud of our son, but would obviously do anything to have him still with us today, and to prevent other families going through this trauma.

If the money raised by yourselves can help researchers get one step closer to saving infants from this awful disease, this will really help make some meaning out of this madness. Given the great science successes achieved for the more common forms of leukaemia, we have every hope this will happen some day soon.

Please donate as generously as your are able. Registering to donate blood and signing up to the stem cell register are also extremely important things you can do to help infants with cancer.

Thank you from us all.

Lots of Love Ant, Rose and Enzo x