A Brighton man who lost his mother to cancer has pioneered a breakthrough treatment and raised the money to make it widely available.
Alex Blyth, 40, turned to Brighton crowdfunding platform Shadow Foundr to raise more than £250,000.
The money will fund the world’s first “cell bank” of a type of cancer-killing white blood cells known as neutrophils – and they can be made in a lab, removing the need to match donors.
Mr Blyth was spurred to seek a cure for cancer when his mother had pancreatic cancer diagnosed five years ago.
He came across the work of tumour expert Zheng Cui in America which relied on matching cells from people who seemed to have an innate immunity to cancer with patients needing treatment.
Mr Blyth, a healthcare businessman, looked for a way to translate the small-scale results from the lab into a new treatment that would offer hope to thousands of cancer patients.
He said: “My mother was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2013 and I knew that there was very little hope.
“I was then looking for a potential therapy that hadn’t been tried before and I came across work that Professor Cui had done.
“It was real breakthrough work on solid tumours that had never been seen before but was still a long way from the clinic.
“Sadly, my mother passed away and I then set up the company LIfT BioSciences to find a curative therapy for pancreatic cancer – and other cancers which are currently considered untreatable.
“I left my job and used my savings for what normal people might use, to buy a house, on doing this.”
The first part of the LIfT BioSciences name derives from the description of the treatment – Leukocyte Infusion Therapy (LIfT).
Mr Blyth said: “We have all started to think of cancer as being incurable and yet every day most of us are successfully killing mutating cells in our body that could otherwise develop into cancers.
“LIfT is about taking the high innate immunity one person has and giving that to a patient. We are doing things differently.
“LIfT in its original form – devised by Dr Cui who, for me, is like the Alexander Fleming of cancer who accidentally discovered a cancer resistant ‘super mouse’ – was simply taking white blood cells from people who had high innate cancer-killing cells and putting them into patients who didn’t.
“While brilliant in its simplicity, it wasn’t very scalable and required too many rare donors which created a logistical issue and commercial challenge.
