According to a story from Yahoo News, The family of Isla Caton, a three year old girl diagnosed with neuroblastoma, has raised enough money for her to travel to New York to receive a special treatment that might be able to save her life.

Neuroblastoma is a type of cancer that forms in nerve tissue, often originating around the adrenal glands. It is the most common type of cancer found in babies. The cancer has usually spread to other areas of the body at the time of diagnosis.

Symptoms include bone pain, a mass in the abdomen, chest, or neck, or a bluish lump under the skin. The early symptoms are rarely diagnostic, and identifying neuroblastoma can be challenging in its early stages. The symptoms also vary depending on where the tumor is located and if the cancer has spread. The cause is not understood in most cases, though there may be a possibility of genetic inheritance in some of them. Outcomes for neuroblastoma depend greatly on the risk category of the disease; localized cancer tumors are often curable, but severe, high risk cases can be resistant to treatment and can often relapse. To learn more about neuroblastoma, click here.

Isla Caton is originally from Hornchurch of eastern London. So far, her family has managed to raise £150,000 so that she can travel to receive a special treatment at a hospital in New York. Her fight was also supported by the Bradley Lowery Foundation. Isla was first diagnosed with neuroblastoma in March 2017. The disease had already spread to her bone marrow and bones, and doctors gave her a forty percent chance of surviving. Since them, the three year old has endured long, extensive bouts of treatment, including chemotherapy, surgery in order to get rid of tumors, and radiation therapy. Doctors have raised her chances to sixty percent, and she is currently undergoing immunotherapy until the summer.

It is then that Isla and her family will begin their trip to New York. There she will receive a bivalent vaccine. This vaccine will hopefully prevent the cancer from returning; neuroblastoma is notorious for its ability to relapse in high risk cases, even after extensive treatment. The bivalent vaccine introduces an antibody that will hopefully get rid of the remaining cancer cells. For now, Isla has to stay strong and continue her treatment and hopefully, by the end of the summer, her cancer will be gone.

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