OHMYGOSSIP — Dame Deborah James’s Bowlebabe fund has reached £11.3 million,
The former headteacher-turned-cancer campaigner – who was known as Bowelbabe – lost her bowel cancer battle in June last year aged 40 but set up the campaign just one month before her death and now her mum Heather has thanked the hundreds of thousands of people who donated as she vowed to keep going with the fundraising.
Speaking on ITV’s ‘Lorraine’, she told stand-in host Ranvir Singh: “She’d set a target of £250,000 and I think within a day it had hit £1 million and she was just overwhelmed, as we all were. And, I just wish she was here to see that it was £ 11.3 million, but we’re not going to stop there, we’re gonna make it even bigger! Besides the money, that’s amazing, I just want to thank every supporter. There was over 333,000 individual supporters to raise that and to me, that is overwhelming, the amount of people she touched. And it’s a big thank you to them as well.”
After being diagnosed with bowel cancer in 2016, Deborah – who is survived by her husband Sebastien Bowen and their teenage children Hugo and Elise – began documenting her journey through a newspaper column and as a co-host of BBC podcast ‘You, Me and the Big C’ alongside fellow cancer patients Lauren Mahon and Rachael Bland, the latter of whom passed away in 2018.
More projects for the Bowelbabe campaign are set to be announced later this year but so far the family has decided to give some money to a project led by Centre for Evolution and Cancer at the Institute of Cancer Research, London that will examine the beginnings of a new precision treatment as well as one that will look at targeting microbes that might cause cancer.
Sebastien said: “I’m immensely proud and humbled to continue the work that Deborah started.
“As a family, we’ve been overwhelmed by all the support the fund has received, and to raise £11.3 million is just incredible. We’ve taken some time to select the first round of funded projects, and are pleased to announce them today. There is some fantastic, cutting-edge bowel cancer research and brilliant awareness activity taking place, and we know that Deborah would be behind this every step of the way.”
Donate at https://www.bowelbabe.org/.

Source: VacationHunter.Online