The family behind the Harley Staples Cancer Trust (HSCT) visited the University of Leeds earlier this week to learn more about acute lymphoblastic leukaemia (ALL) research they funded through Children’s Cancer and Leukaemia Group (CCLG) in 2023.
Funded by the HSCT and administered through the CCLG Research Funding Network, Dr Joan Boyes has been working on how genetic errors in childhood ALL can lead to cancer becoming resistant to treatment.
The Staples family – dad Jamie, mum Katherine, son Gabriel and daughter Annabelle - were keen to learn more about the research they’d funded in memory of their son and big brother, Harley. Katherine and Jamie set up the HSCT in 2010 after eight-year-old Harley passed away from B-cell acute lymphoblastic leukaemia. Jamie said:
The initial reason for setting up the trust was to provide holidays for children and their families to get time together away from hospitals and treatments and create some good memories for them.
Once we had established the holidays, we decided that the funds we had available would be better suited to research into children’s cancers, particularly focusing on the rare ones like Harley had and which aren’t at the forefront of research budgets.
We wanted to meet Joan and her team in person to get a first-hand experience of how her research is carried out in the lab and to understand how the research project works and is all pulled together.
Our children didn’t meet Harley, so it was important that they could see what his legacy is now providing for others like him.
Dr Boyes gave the family a tour of her lab and introduced them to her research team. While Katherine and Jamie had an update on what their funding had achieved, Gabriel, 11, and Annabelle, nine, had a go at some experiments with Joan’s team. Dr Boyes said:
We thoroughly enjoyed hosting the Staples family. It was a lot of fun thinking about what experiments Gabriel and Annabelle might like to do. They were keen to learn, and it was lovely to see the pleasure they got from extracting DNA from kiwi fruit and staining proteins with Irn Bru.
Funding from the Harley Staples Cancer Trust has enabled us to identify how some relapse causing mutations occur and to come up with ideas to prevent them. It has also identified biomarkers that could be extremely useful as an early indicator of relapse.
In the afternoon, Dr Boyes’s colleague at the University of Leeds, Jessica Mifsud-Bonnici , accompanied the Staples to the Brotherton library to see the Remembering Leeds Book, which will soon commemorate the funding of the project in Harley’s memory. They also had a brief philanthropic tour of the campus and visited the university’s exciting new virtual reality centre. Jamie said:
The kids would say their favourite bits of the visit were the experiments and virtual reality experience, but I think it was meeting Joan and her team and seeing the passion and enthusiasm that they have for the work they do.
The positive results that Joan has had so far made us feel that our funding produced something positive that could go further.
Sarah Evans, CCLG Research Manager, accompanied the Staples family on the visit. She said:
The CCLG Research Funding Network helps charities like the Harley Staples Cancer Trust maximise the impact of their funding. We handle the research assessment and administration, allowing them to invest more in research projects like Joan’s.
The lab visit was fascinating, and I enjoyed learning more about the promising applications of Joan’s work, such as developing tests to help doctors assess their patients. It was brilliant to see the Harley Staples Cancer Trust family getting involved and witnessing first-hand how their research will make a difference.