Dan's Life Saving Cancer Medication

We, as a family, were told the devastating and brutal news this week to take our son home from the hospital and to make memories for one last time. We were also told that time is short for Dan and that currently there are no viable medications openly available to the NHS to treat Dan’s cancer diagnosis.

Dan, previously, before his diagnosis, was a keen footballer and played for Newark Town FC as their goalie. Dan's footballing endeavors were reaching an all time high and even though he was playing at an under 18 level, he was garnering attention from the senior clubs. Dan was excited about the possibilities of pursuing this along with his University place, for studying Geography at Lincoln, due to start this year in September.

However, unfortunately, last December (2022) Dan was diagnosed, at the age of 17, with a rare cancer called, Primary Mediastinal B Cell Lymphoma (PMBCL) at Stage 4 and has endured Chemo, Radiotherapy, clinical trials and CAR T over this last year. All these treatments have failed.

However, the medications, Brentuximab vedotin and Nivolumab in combination were used in a clinical trial, called Checkmate 436, and were specifically used to treat people with the same condition/diagnosis as Dan and were found to show good efficacy with durable responses when used as a bridging treatment to transplant. Even though these drugs that Dan needs, have been authorised and marketed as cancer medications through the NHS, they are only available for patients with certain cancers and are not available for patients with PMBCL.

Therefore, as time is of the essence and we need to acquire and buy the medications from the pharmaceutical companies as soon as possible to start the treatment on Dan we have started this fundraising page. We know that Dan will need at least 8 or 9 cycles of the combination medications and these will be administered every 21 days intravenously. The medications alone are over £10,000 for just 1 cycle and these are if we solely get them based on the NHS prices, that we've had access to. However this does not include the staffing costs and other medications that are also involved for his care. We've set the fundraising goal to £100,000 and it may go up or down depending on the care that Dan gets. If you can donate that would be amazing to help this cause and we'd like to thank you for taking the time to read this.

Thank you

Mark Evans, Natalya Evans, Wendy Glover, Rob Cox