Lisa Gwyn's battle of the bum cancer

In January 2021 Lisa was given the shocking news that she had Stage 4 bowel cancer, made worse with the news that Lisa has a mutant braf gene, which means it is particularly aggressive type of cancer. At 42 years old, and two young children, this was (and still is) an unexpected and devastating situation to be in.

Lisa quickly underwent radiation and has managed 9 rounds of chemotherapy. Whilst this was showing really promising signs of fighting the cancer initially, it has since stopped working. This has exhausted all funded options of treatment so we are now on to using unfunded drugs, which are designed to target the mutant type cancer Lisa has. These drugs are Cetuximab (given via IV every two weeks) and Encorafenib (taken orally daily)

The cost of this treatment starts out at $25K a month, dropping to about $6K a month after 6 months. The price reduction is because the total paid for the drugs is capped, and so eventually we just pay for administration of the drugs. We (Lisa and partner) have some money put aside to get started but because of the expense of the drugs, are asking for your help to keep going with the treatment.