Brighton Lions Club has been serving the local, national and international communities for more than sixty years and we would like to share with you some of our achievements.

23 January 2010

Jungle Jottings

The February issue of Jungle Jottings, the club newsletter, has now been uploaded and can be read in pdf format right here.

22 January 2010

21 January 2010

More donations

At its meeting last night, 20 January, the club agreed to make the following donations:
  • £1,000 to Lions Clubs International Foundation for the Haitian earthquake appeal;
  • £1,000 to Downs View, a special school in Brighton;
  • the second year's grant of £1,000 to a potential Paralympic athlete.

14 January 2010

Haitian earthquake

Following the devastating earthquake in Haiti, Lions Clubs International Foundation (the charitable arm if Lions Clubs International) has awarded a US$50,000 Major Catastrophe Grant to help provide for immediate needs for victims of the devastating earthquake. LCIF is in contact with Lions in Haiti, as well as neighboring Latin American countries and Lions leadership in the area, to assess the situation and determine immediate needs and how Lions and LCIF can best assist further.

12 January 2010

Normal service will be resumed as soon as possible

Many people have been affected by the bad weather over the last week, and it has led to some curtailment of our normal activities. Transport should have been provided today for blind people to attend their monthly social meeting, but that has had to be cancelled. Our bingo session at Lions Dene tomorrow evening has also been cancelled. Many of our members are still unable to get their cars onto the road and Friday's bingo session at Evelyn Glennie House may well turn out to be another casualty of the snow.

06 January 2010

Lions International Blood Research Appeal

LIBRA is supported by Brighton Lions and funds research into blood-related diseases carried out at Kings College Hospital, London. An article published in the Daily telegraph this week reads:

British researchers have developed a treatment that can be used to stop the disease returning after chemotherapy or bone marrow transplant.

Eventually it is hoped the drug, which activates the body's own immune system against the leukaemia, could be used to treat other types of cancers.

The first patients will be treated in the New Year as part of a small clinical trial at King's College London.

The patients in the trial have the form known as Acute myeloid leukaemia (AML), the most common form in adults. Even with aggressive treatment half would usually find the disease returns.

The idea behind cancer 'vaccines" is not necessarily to prevent the disease. Instead, once a patient has been diagnosed, the 'vaccine' programmes the immune system to hunt down cancer cells and destroy them.

The vaccine then prompts the immune system to recognise leukaemia cells if they return which prevents a relapse of the disease.

The vaccine is created by removing cells from the patient's blood and manipulating them in the laboratory.

The cells are given two genes which act as flags to help identify the leukaemia. It effectively focuses and boosts the immune system's ability to seek out and destroy cancer cells.

The research is due to be published in the Journal of Cancer Immunology, Immunotherapy shortly.

Leukaemia is a cancer of the white blood cells and bone marrow and affects around 7,200 patients a year. Around 4,300 die from the disease annually.

Treatment comes in two stages - chemotherapy to rid the body of the disease, then to prevent it returning either further chemotherapy or a bone marrow transplant.

Latest survival rates show that more than half the people with leukaemia die within five years of diagnosis.

The study led by Professors Ghulam Mufti and Farzin Farzaneh and Dr Nicola Hardwick at University College London, has involved intricate work to develop a man-made virus, similar to HIV, which carries the two genes into the immune system.

Prof Farzaneh, Professor of Molecular Medicine at King's College London, said if the trials are successful then it could "rolled out" to treat other leukaemias and cancers.

"It is the same concept as normal vaccines. The immune system is made to see something as foreign and can then destroy it itself. This has the chance to be curative."

In the initial stages patients will be enrolled in the trial if they have had chemotherapy and a bone marrow transplant.

If early trials are successful the vaccine may be tested in patients who cannot have a bone marrow transplant because they are unsuitable or a match cannot be found.

Dr David Grant, scientific director of the charity Leukaemia Research, said: "Vaccines against cancer are becoming a very interesting area of research and can offer a very beneficial alternative to punishing chemotherapy.

"However it is very early days and we need to see the results of these trials before we know if this potential is going too be realised."

The research was carried out at the King's College London Experimental Cancer Centre, which is one of 17 new centres across the country launched to develop basic science into treatments for patients as quickly as possible.

The study follows successful experiments on mice with leukaemia which showed that injection with a vaccine extended their lives by the equivalent of 25 years.

Half of the mice had no relapse at all.