Clinical trials suggest it can triple life expectancy for people with the cancer from around six more months to 18 months. <\/p>\n
“Now other families can get that help too,” said Huw’s dad Gareth.<\/p>\n
“It is very important for the patients suffering from this cancer that this is available.<\/p>\n
“The drug brought a glimmer of hope to Huw.”<\/p>\n
It was in September 2024 that Huw, from Llanuwchllyn, Gwynedd, first realised something was wrong while swimming in Llyn Tegid. <\/p>\n
He felt a pain in his abdomen, so visited a doctor, with tests confirming he had cholangiocarcinoma.<\/p>\n
By this point it had spread to his lungs. <\/p>\n
“Huw was extremely lucky to be able to get Zanidatamab through doctors in London,” Gareth added.<\/p>\n
“When Huw was diagnosed the drug wasn’t available on the health service, we had to find it ourselves.<\/p>\n
“The drug made a massive difference to him, his tumours shrunk and his symptoms improved almost immediately.”<\/p>\n
It allowed him precious time with wife Cadi and Idris during his first months.<\/p>\n
While he knew it wouldn’t cure him, the drug gave Huw something to be positive about and enabled him to look a short distance into the future with hope, according to his dad. <\/p>\n
“Hope is the best way of describing it,” Gareth added.<\/p>\n
“Huw had so much hope and he was looking forward to getting better and that’s what kept him going for so long.”<\/p>\n
Huw died in February, 17 months after being diagnosed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Clinical trials suggest it can triple life expectancy for people with the cancer from around six more months…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":563544,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[59,57,58,50,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-563543","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-kingdom","tag-gb","tag-great-britain","tag-greatbritain","tag-news","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/563543","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=563543"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/563543\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/563544"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=563543"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=563543"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=563543"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}