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How a Teen with Stone Harbor Roots is Helping Drive Cancer Treatment Innovation

How a Teen with Stone Harbor Roots is Helping Drive Cancer Treatment Innovation

By Collin Hall

Grace Martin, left, presents a check to the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia Foundation. She raised the funds through the “Shells of Hope” nonprofit she helped found.
Grace Martin, left, presents a check to the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia Foundation. She raised the funds through the “Shells of Hope” nonprofit she helped found.

Do you remember the fall of your high school senior year—the college essays, endless applications, forms, decisions, the big final play, and all the stress of figuring out the future? Now, imagine adding to that the challenge of helping others find a treatment for brain cancer! That’s the unlikely story of innovation getting a helping hand from an unexpected quarter.

Grace Martin, an 18-year-old who helped found the popular 7 Mile Island Players theater camp in Stone Harbor, was under operation on her 17th birthday so doctors at CHOP could remove a brain tumor from her right frontal lobe. After a near-full recovery, Grace spends much of her time fundraising for pediatric cancer research, which she says is vastly underfunded compared to adult research. With a $500,000 goal in mind, Martin hopes that a new form of cell treatment can help other kids escape the clutches of childhood cancer.

Martin’s tumor was in an easily-operable section of her brain. “But if anything about this had been just a little bit different, I would be in so much trouble,” she said.

Martin is raising money through the “Shells of Hope” nonprofit she started when she was 13. Her current focus is CAR T cell delivery research, which is partially spearheaded by one of the doctors who helped her survive her cancer journey.

CAR T cell delivery is a relatively new form of treatment that introduces modified T cells into the body to target cancer cells directly. The FDA approved six kinds of CAR T cell therapies in April 2023, but the approved treatments target blood-based cancers instead of solid cancers like tumors. One of Martin’s doctors, Peter J. Madsen, is trying to solve this problem: how can CAR T cells be safely introduced into solid cancer clusters?

Martin hopes that Dr. Madsen’s research can eventually bring CAR T treatment to children who have tumors in otherwise inoperable locations. Martin said that clinical trials will cost nearly a million dollars, but are necessary for further research grants and funding.

She has an ambitious goal: $50,000 every year for ten years. She feels confident that the goal is realistic, given her family’s experience with fundraising. She organized her first fundraiser, a clothing drive through the then-unincorporated “Shells of Hope,” when she was just a young teenager.

“My mom drove me around to every house in our neighborhood to drop off pamphlets to spread the word,” Martin told the Herald while driving to New York City for an audition.

The events she puts on today are more elaborate but bring bigger money. Martin’s mother stressed that they fundraise for a number of cancer-related causes; she wants donors to find a Shells of Hope initiative they are most excited by, and give accordingly. Right now, Martin is working with the nonprofit’s board of directors and volunteers to plan a fashion show with the Seven Mile Players, a golf tournament, and other event formats with long-proven track records.

Martin believes that CAR T cell research can bring hope to those who might otherwise have no paths for treatment. She stressed again and again in her interview with the Herald that pediatric cancer research is underfunded, receiving just 4% of the federal government cancer research spend. Shells of Hope, she said, is her attempt at righting this wrong.

“It’s very confusing, it seems very unjust to me. We should be taking care of our children so they have a better future. They are our future,” she said.

Visit www.shellsofhopenj.org to find out how you can help. Contact the author, Collin Hall, at chall@cmcherald.com

Content Marketing Coordinator / Reporter

Collin Hall grew up in Wildwood Crest and is both a reporter and the editor of Do The Shore. Collin currently lives in Villas.

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