Thomas Miller will be battling it out against other companies from the shipping industry to be 2023 Dragon Boat Race champions, all with the same goal of having fun & raising lots of money for the OSCAR Campaign!

About OSCAR and Great Ormond Street Hospital

The OSCAR Campaign supports treatments and research within the bone marrow specialism at Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children. The Campaign is named after Oscar Parry, son of Spinnaker's Chairman Phil Parry. Oscar received life-saving care from GOSH when he was very young. Oscar endured two forms of leukaemia, two bone marrow transplants, the first ever childhood mesenchymal stem cell transplant in the UK, over 100 blood transfusions, five brain hemorrhages and five years of chemotherapy. Thanks to the pioneering work of the bone marrow transplant team at GOSH, Oscar is now 23, and the shipping community is saving the lives of other children by supporting more and more new treatments for children with previously incurable diseases.

On the surface, GOSH is a normally-funded NHS hospital, but beneath the surface it is a world-leading living breathing research laboratory that treats – and saves – the sickest children from all over the globe. It does this thanks to its ability to hire the best people and to invest in their work. That is thanks to the charitable funds it raises from supporters, again all over the globe. The charity has suffered during the pandemic and needs our help more than ever.

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.