Dundee-based Phaeo and Para Cancer Charity (PPCC) has been boosted by a fund-raising golf day which raised £10,000.
The money from the bi-annual event held over the Lansdowne course at Blairgowrie Golf Club will go towards continuing research into phaeochromocytomas and paraganglioma cancers, rare but potentially devastating conditions usually diagnosed in people aged 20-40 years.
Local man Jo Williamson set up the charity after losing his wife Sue to the rare disease and he subsequently discovered that of his four children, two also have the faulty gene that cut short their mother’s life.
He said the money raised from the golf day will be vital in helping continue key research.
“I would like to personally thank everyone who contributed to making the day such a great success,” said Jo, the charity’s chairman. “We smashed our initial target and myself and our trustees are enormously grateful for the generosity shown by all those in attendance. PPC is a relatively unknown cancer and days like this not only help raise vital funds but also help educate more people about its devastating effects.”
The charity is in its eighth year having been set up in 2018 and has since raised over £100,000. These funds have supported global research groups across Europe, India and the USA which have established an animal worm model that mimics these cancers, and which responds in predictable ways.
In addition, the worm model expresses identical cellular markers to those seen in the human cancer cells.
Professor Graham Leese, chairman of the charity’s Scientific Committee, provided an encouraging update on the recent research data.
“Recently, the worm model has been shown to respond to a drug treatment that is known to work in some humans but can have toxic side effects,” he said.
“The future plan is to use this worm model to test an array of different drugs. This will allow human research to be restricted to a select group of drugs which have been shown to work in the worm, thus accelerating the time to find potentially successful treatments for this cancer. As many other cancers function in a similar way, the work may well be useful to establish new treatments more widely.”
