Welcome to the Sophie Atay Appeal Website
Sophie Appeal on ITV News
A big thank you to everyone for your massive support.
Our beautiful baby girl Sophie Atay was born fit and healthy on 15 November 2007 at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Gateshead, Tyne and Wear.
One day whilst drying Sophie after her usual bath I felt a lump on the left side of her tummy. After numerous and frustrating hospital visits over a 10 day period Sophie was diagnosed with neuroblastoma stage 4 (high risk) on Monday 16 February 2009. I will never forget that day! Her cancer had spread to her bone marrow. She was just 15 months old. Neuroblastoma is a rare and aggressive malignant cancer with horrendous survival rates as low as 20%. Relapse is very common which is reflected in the survival rate. If relapse does occur there is no cure at the moment in the UK.
Sophie has a long and tough road ahead of her. She is on the high risk UK treatment protocol which involves 70 days of aggressive chemotherapy, surgery to remove the primary tumour, a stem cell rescue which involves wiping out her immune system, 14 days of radiotherapy and 6 months of accutane (oral chemotherapy). Such a tough regime to be given such low percentage of survival! Sophie has just completed her 70 days of chemotherapy. Scans have proven that Sophie's main tumour has shrunk by more than 95 percent. She is booked in for surgery on 16 June 2009 to try to remove the remainder of the primary tumour.
After extensively searching through the current treatments available, an option for Sophie would be to have a monoclonal antibody known as 3f8 at the same time as she has her Accutane (oral chemotherapy). Combined, this treatment gives Sophie a staggering 80-90% of survival. The huge downside of this is that the only place in the world that offers this treatment is a hospital in New York called Memorial Sloan Kettering Hospital. The cost for this treatment alone can be in excess of $500,000. Of course we don't have this kind of money and that is why we are trying to raise money for this treatment to save our baby's life. The oral chemotherapy stage is estimated around October/November time, and we are running out of time to save Sophie.
