OK, so Tony Russell (he of Ironman Triathlon Sickness) has asked me to pen a short piece for his blog to bring you all up to speed with what’s happening at Headcase and where exactly your donations will be going…..

You may already know that Headcase is currently funding two 3 Year Research Programmes at the University of Portsmouth both of which have produced some exciting results so far. However the really exciting news is that in the Spring we are also going to be starting a 2 Year Patient Trial in collaboration with the University of Portsmouth, Southampton General Hospital and the University of Bergen, Norway. The trial will be assessing patients with recurrent GBM using a drug called Clomipramine which has shown very good responses in earlier trials and ad hoc patient survival cases (10 years in the longest case). Clomipramine is an old anti-depressant drug which has been around since the 1960’s. All of the money raised by Tony and the guys will be going directly into the Trial.

To put that into perspective £200 will pay for a day of the Trial (it will cost around £40,000 annually) but perhaps most importantly nearly all of our donations go directly to our research, or in this case Trial. Headcase is an extremely efficient Charity where 98.2% of donations go directly to research, and if you add Gift Aid to the equation then for every £1 we receive we actually spend £1.05 on research! We’re able to do this because our model is that we don’t employ anyone and no-one takes a single penny from Headcase as salary and we guarantee that they never will! Headcase is a modern Charity using modern marketing and fundraising strategies which don’t rely on costly manpower like the traditional charities.  

Please support Tony and the guys as best you can and remember…… The Future Gets WrittenToday.

All of the information about the upcoming Trial and the Research Results to date are on the website http://www.headcase.org.uk/heads-up. 

Cheers,

Col

Colin Speirs
Head Fundraiser
Headcase Cancer Trust