Brave Lucca battles back
EACH morning before heading to kindergarten and again before bed, 3-year-old Lucca Holecliffe has a mug of Milo spiked with a chemotherapy drug.
The drug, a form of precision medicine, has successfully kept her epithelioid inflammatory myofibroblastic sarcoma – an incredibly rare, aggressive cancer – at bay.
At the time of her diagnosis in March 2016, only nine other cases had been documented worldwide. Eight of those nine died within nine months. But two years on, Lucca is healthy.
And this week an innovative clinical trial using a state-of-theart genetic test to improve quality of life for Kiwi kids with tough-to-treat and relapsed forms of cancer, will be launched to help those is situations similar to Lucca.
A New Zealand first, the Precision Paediatric Cancer Project (PPCP) will use nextgeneration sequencing (NGS) to identify gene mutations in the cancers of children and adolescents.
Over the next five years, the trial will allow new targetedtreatment options to be identified for children up to 18 where standard treatment options are ineffective.
Childhood cancer is the second-biggest killer of New Zealand children after accidental death, with an average of three diagnosed with some form of cancer each week.
Lucca’s mum, Jordana Holecliffe, says precision medicine is truly ‘‘lifechanging’’.
‘‘It’s a profoundly different experience to traditional chemotherapy. I truly believe without it she’d be dead. It’s saved her life.’’
The PPCP, jointly funded by
ABIGAIL DOUGHERTY/ STUFF Cure Kids and the Child Cancer Foundation for $1.25 million, can enrol around 25 patients a year for four years, with a maximum capacity of 120.