PLEASE NOTE DATE CHANGE TO 22ND SEPTEMBER 2022

About the OSCAR Campaign

The OSCAR Campaign raises funds towards areas of urgent need at Great Ormond Street Hospital and its research partner, the UCL Institute of Child Health. The campaign is raising money to support priority areas of research which will improve children’s lives worldwide.

The campaign is led by Phil Parry, Chairman of Spinnaker, whose son Oscar was diagnosed with leukaemia at just three years old.  Oscar received three life-saving transplants at GOSH, one of which was a ground-breaking stem cell transplant. He is living proof of the importance of pioneering research. Had he been in the same situation a year earlier, it is unlikely he would have survived.

Why are we doing this?
Remarkable medical breakthroughs have been made by the doctors and research teams at Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children and their colleagues in other research institutes, but the need for research funds remains desperate. 

The bone marrow unit and cellular research teams cannot
afford to do much of the work that requires them to collaborate with industry colleagues that is crucial to taking their work forward.  By directing funds from the OSCAR Campaign appropriately, we help them to do that.

Oscar is now 23.  Fifteen years on from the experimental treatments that saved his life and that have saved the lives of others since him, he is employed full time as a chef, cooking banquets in the livery halls of the City of London. Good news stories like Oscar's really are only possible thanks to fundraising that enables research to go beyond the funding available from the public purse.

Latest Developments
The OSCAR Campaign has recently approved direction of some of its fundraising towards CAR T cell therapy, which involves genetically engineering the patient's immune cells to fight against leukaemia. This approach has been remarkably successful in patients with otherwise incurable acute lymphoblastic leukaemia (including many that have relapsed after bone marrow transplatation (BMT)) and is now an NHS-approved treatment for such children. In 2021 GOSH treated over 20 children with this approach on the BMT unit. 

The problem is that while almost all patients respond initially, around half will relapse and this often because the patient loses circulating CAR T cells for reasons we don’t really understand. The OSCAR-supported three-year Fellowship will fund research to investigate why some patients lose their CAR T cells and the reasons for this. Understanding this will enable the design of strategies to make CAR T cells persist in all patients and hence prevent relapse after CAR T cell therapy. This is a really exciting project and if it’s successful it will save lives.

Thank you for your support.
Phil Parry

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