CANCER battler Jamie Inglis has now finished the second course of antibody therapy designed to save his life.

Readers of The Press helped four-year-old Jamie’s family, of Elvington, raise £250,000 to send him to America for the revolutionary antibody treatment.

The youngster went through high-dose chemotherapy to kill off the virulent neuroblastoma cells and is now on his second of five courses of the antibody treatment.

With neuroblastoma, recurrence of the disease is common and of it comes back there is very little that doctors can do.

But the antibody therapy is designed, in essence, to identify substances in cancer cells or substances that may help cancer cells grow.

The antibodies attach to the substances and kill the cancer cells, block their growth, or keep them from spreading.

But the treatment itself is harsh.

Jamie’s dad John, who is currently in America with his family but is usually based in Germany with the British Army, said: “On the second day he had to be sent to the intensive care unit and they had to stop the antibody temporarily because he took a bad reaction – basically an immune response to the antibody.

“He got a rash on his back, his temperature spiked and his blood pressure started to drop. We were worried that they would remove him from the antibody program completely.

“Thankfully he made a quick recovery and resumed the next day, but they had to review the way it was administered and increased the time it was given from 10 to 20 hours. This just proves that it is a toxic treatment and can cause some serious side effects. He still had a few complications, but overall tolerated it well.”

But John said Jamie was now through the second course of the treatment – although he still had three more to go. The next course is due to begin in about three weeks.