Matt Long cancer treatment fundraiser

Our son Matt Long is a multi award winning guitarist, singer and songwriter with blues rock band Catfish. He is also about to marry the love of his life Samantha Leese in a couple of months, and has a lot of people who love him very much. He has a lot to live for.

Matt has been battling bowel cancer for just under a year and despite surgery and chemo, his latest scan shows that the cancer has spread into his liver and stomach lining. His cancer team have said although there is the option of trying a different type of chemo, they don’t hold out much hope that it will cure him and is likely to at best extend his life a little.

Essentially, we have almost exhausted the options available on the NHS. But we aren’t ready to give up on him.

There is an option to have a sample of the tumour sequenced which will give us the maximum amount of information on its make up, which will then show the cancer team exactly what drugs to use to damage it - to either slow it down, or there is just a small chance that they may be able to kill it.

Obviously, we want to give him access to absolutely everything that might give him a chance. The only access to this treatment is via the private route which is going to be expensive - just the sequencing, which involves sending a sample of the tumour to the USA to a specialist lab, is a little under £3k and any drugs will apparently be about £3k a month after that. We will fund what we can as a family, but obviously any ‘fighting fund’ you can give us would be very much appreciated.

Without any treatment, his cancer team have told us he won’t make it past the end of this year. With the access to sequencing, if it turns out to be something specific they have drugs for, he may have a 15% chance of survival. That has to be worth a shot.

UPDATE - We know that this could be a money pit once we get involved in the private medical world in the USA so we will keep adjusting the goal total as we go - you guys have already been incredible and we have raised enough to get us through the immediate timescale of the next couple of months, but we will also now be able to at least investigate other cutting edge options in the US which we wouldn’t have access to in the U.K. Thank you all so much for giving us a glimmer of hope.

Any help, however small, gratefully received. If you can share this for us, that would be great. Please help Matt fight back.