After surgery for a malignant brain tumor, 11-year-old MacKenzie Stuck couldn’t talk, walk or feed herself.
She still struggles with her speech and is much smaller than her sixth-grade peers, but today MacKenzie is a voice for pediatric cancer patients.
“I want to do everything I can to help find a cure,” Stuck said Thursday at a ceremony for the Hyundai Hope on Wheels campaign, which raises money for Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center in Baltimore City.
“I hope I will inspire other people to join the fight on cancer,” said Stuck, of Mount Airy, who is a regional youth ambassador for the program.
Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center received $40,000 this year, part of the $1.6 million being donated to 32 pediatric cancer research institutes nationwide through Hyundai’s Hope on Wheels, an awareness program including 780 Hyundai dealerships.
Since its inception 10 years ago, Hope on Wheels has raised more than $10 million, said Brian Kilby, of the Hyundai dealership in Bel Air who presented the donation to hospital officials at the cancer center.
The funding will support the research of Dr. Christopher Gamper, a pediatric oncologist who is studying the immune system’s potential for fighting cancer.
New research is showing the potential “to harness patients’ own immune systems,” Gamper said.
Cancer often tricks cells into becoming immune-suppression cells. If these cells can be reprogrammed, they can effectively fight the tumor, he said.
Chemotherapy and radiation are the most common and effective treatments, but they are toxic for patients, Gamper said. Immune treatment could reduce the toxicity.
The funding “is an opportunity for me to get my research career established,” he said.
Gamper’s research sounds promising to Sue Stuck, MacKenzie’s mother, who has watched her daughter struggle through months of chemotherapy, radiation and rehabilitation.
“If her immune system was strong enough. … Can you imagine?” she said. “That would be spectacular.”
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