Help Liv fight cancer with a personalized vaccine!

This is a fundraiser for Liv, a 9 year old who loves animals and anime. She also happens to have been fighting cancer for the last year and a half. Since being diagnosed with Ewing's Sarcoma in July 2022, she has undergone multiple rounds of chemotherapy, radiation, a 13 hour surgery to remove most of her femur, and currently is undergoing a stem cell transplant at City of Hope. At this point in her journey, the family is looking to cutting edge approaches, research and trials to save or even prolong her life.

One of these new approaches is through vaccines. The family currently is working with a non-profit and the Cleveland Clinic to create a personalized vaccine to help fight Liv's cancer. Although the company running point on the vaccine is a non-profit, the cost associated with the labor to design the vaccine (done by scientists at WashU), manufacture the vaccine (done by a company called CS Bio), and work with the FDA to obtain single-use approval is ~$80K. The family has already paid $20K to start the process.

So why a vaccine? When people think of vaccines they usually think of a vaccine that prevents something from happening (e.g., the flu). But there are many "therapeutic" vaccines in development to fight cancer. For example, Memorial Sloan Kettering is working on a vaccine that has shown promise in pancreatic cancer patients.

In Liv's case, every single cancer cell in her body has a signature called EWS-FLI1. It's a fusion of two genes that are not supposed to be fused together, and it's what causes these cells to turn cancerous. Vaccines work by training your immune system to recognize something foreign in your body and attack it. In Liv's case, her EWS-FLI1 fusion expresses a protein (i.e., neoantigen) that her immune system cannot see for some reason. If it could see this protein it would theoretically send T cells to bind to the protein and kill the cancer cell. We hope that a personalized vaccine will help her immune system do just that.

Your donation will go directly towards the costs associated with the vaccine production and administration. Thank you so much for taking the time to read about Liv and her story. Sending love to all of you!