THE mum of a former Skipton Girls’ High School student who was diagnosed with stage 4 brain cancer at the age of 19 has thrown herself into fundraising to allow her daughter as much precious life as possible.

Last September Laura Nuttall was only six weeks into her first term at Kings College University, in London, studying International Relations when she became ill.

“She’d worked so hard to get her three grade As and was just getting used to student life when she started to suffer headaches; nothing serious just persistent and annoying headaches. She went to the GP and he said to monitor the situation,” explained Laura's mum, Nicola.

“Laura joined the University Navy Corps and as part of the process she had a medical and an eye test. During the test the optician recognised abnormalities behind Laura’s eyes and referred her to Moorfields Eye Hospital who referred her to a neurologist.”

At Homerton Hospital Laura had CT and MRI scans and the family was dealt the devastating blow that she had six tumours.

Following surgery at Salford Royal they were told Laura had Glioblastoma Multiforme, which is the most aggressive stage 4 brain cancer.

Laura is currently on six months of chemotherapy treatment. In the meantime the family is researching a range of immunotherapy treatments, even those in an experimental stage to try and prolong her life.

Typically a diagnosis like this brings with it a life expectancy of between 12 and 18 months.

“As a family we couldn’t believe that our beautiful intelligent girl with so much life ahead of her, was basically facing a death sentence. It’s just heart breaking,” Mrs Nuttall added.

She has now found a groundbreaking DCVax immune therapy treatment offering hope.

“Unfortunately for us, the DCVax treatment has yet to be approved by NICE so we would need to fund the whole treatment for Laura ourselves. The cost of this will be an initial £150,000 and a maintenance cost of about £26,000 per year which is a huge amount of money for any family to try to find,” Mrs Nuttall added.

To date a GoFundMe page has raised almost £91,000, of a target of £150,000, from wellwishers including £10,000 which has been raised by Trawden Athletic Club.

Skipton Girls’ High School has also thrown itself into fundraising and set itself a challenge to raise £1,000 for the #doingitforlaura campaign and raised more than £5,600 in one week.

Anyone wishing to donate can do so at: https://www.gofundme.com/ngdq37-doing-it-for-laura.