Jessie’s Argonauts

Jessie’s Argonauts Supporting childhood brain tumour research
Registered Charity number 1215359

01/06/2026

"Our mission is to change the odds for other families"

Jessica Brown was nine when she died from medulloblastoma, a fast-growing brain tumour, in March 2024.

Her parents say she was brave, kind and generous, always wanting to make others feel better. After her death, her desire to improve the lives of others inspired them to donate her brain tissue to our research.

They have since set up Jessie’s Argonauts , a charity to honour her memory, with the mission of supporting research into kinder, more effective treatments — so other children facing a similar devastating diagnosis will be able to enjoy the future Jessie was unable to have.

The charity has recently donated £5,000 to support our research into new targeted treatments for medulloblastoma.

Sally, Jessie’s mum, says: "To go through all this grief and pain and then try to walk away from the situation, knowing the next child who relapses will have the same thing happen, seems wrong and makes our child's death seem senseless.

We want something good to come out of the bad, to change the odds for other families, and we know Jessie would have wanted this too. It would be lovely if the research we are supporting could lead to a potential new treatment that could be taken to clinical trial."

✨ ❤️ We are delighted to welcome Jessie’s Argonauts as one of our new charity partners and are extremely grateful to the Brown family for supporting our childhood brain cancer research.

We're pleased to confirm that Meta has now enabled Facebook Fundraisers for our charity (to those of you who have found ...
04/05/2026

We're pleased to confirm that Meta has now enabled Facebook Fundraisers for our charity (to those of you who have found this already - a big thank you 🙂)

If anyone is thinking of doing a Facebook fundraiser (e.g. birthday fundraisers etc), we would be very grateful if you would consider supporting Jessie's Argonauts, in aid of groundbreaking research that could benefit other children like Jess in the future.

(This is very simple to do - just search for 'fundraisers' on your profile page, then you can follow the link to select your chosen charity)

Many thanks
Jessie's Argonauts

Good evening everyone,We're pleased to announce that we have been able to provide initial contribution of £5,000 additio...
12/04/2026

Good evening everyone,

We're pleased to announce that we have been able to provide initial contribution of £5,000 additional funding to the 'Targeting SRC in Group 4 Medulloblastoma' project at the Institute of Cancer Research. Thank you so much to everyone who has helped us to make this possible. Your support will enhance the impact of this groundbreaking study, enabling vital additional laboratory work to be carried out.

We hope to bring you further updates and news soon.

Picture: Dr. Rob Van Montfort: Co-Supervisor of the project (Photograph: John Angerson / ICR).

10/03/2026

It feels like only yesterday we lost a very special person, but it was two years to this day that brain cancer finally took the last it possibly could from our wonderful girl. Jess was a funny, caring, thoughtful (the list would go on and on) child that deserved a whole lot more from this world, cruelly denied by a truly horrible illness.

Today we would like to remember her for her personality, her happy times and the joy she brought into our lives - we have a video here of Jess aged 3 - about two years pre-diagnosis - in the aftermath of a chaotic chocolate cake making attempt.

Thank you, Jess, for being a part of our lives. We will never come to terms with losing you but we hope, as you did, that if people keep searching for better treatments then one day other children won't also be robbed of their future in the same way.

We've been working hard on getting some vital charity details finalised, and hope you will support us as we get behind our chosen research project this year.

Thank you so much to all of you lovely people who supported us with our Jessie's Argonauts charity Christmas card campai...
26/01/2026

Thank you so much to all of you lovely people who supported us with our Jessie's Argonauts charity Christmas card campaign. We're delighted to be able to tell you that we raised a total of £2,115, every penny of which will go towards supporting much needed scientific research to try and improve the outlook for children facing a brain tumour diagnosis. Jessie would be thrilled to know that her dino artwork has been put to such good use 😁

A special thanks also to Lauren Croucher and the CMF line dancers who generously raised £373 for us at their Christmas event 💜

We're working on plans for 2026 and hope to share these with you soon. 🫶🏻

Those of you who knew Jess will know that three of the things she loved were Christmas, dinosaurs and drawing, so we tho...
27/11/2025

Those of you who knew Jess will know that three of the things she loved were Christmas, dinosaurs and drawing, so we thought we’d try to combine these and make some dino-themed charity Christmas cards using her artwork…

Christmas cards now available, £5.00 for a pack of 10 A6 cards featuring two of Jess’s designs ‘Jessie’s Christmasaurus’ and ‘Jessie’s Santasaurus.’ We can hand-deliver in our local area around Whitstable, Canterbury and Faversham. If further afield can arrange postage for an additional £1.50.

Please message the page if you’d like to purchase some of these cards and help us support our chosen research project at the Institute of Cancer Research.

Alternatively, they are also available for sale in Whitstable at George’s Mini Market and The Monument pub😁

As parents of a child with a terminal disease, one thing that was so upsetting was helplessly watching the clock run dow...
27/11/2025

As parents of a child with a terminal disease, one thing that was so upsetting was helplessly watching the clock run down on their life while looking all over the world for treatment options, and still finding absolutely nothing that could offer a cure. We would therefore like to try and make a contribution towards changing this state of affairs. All children facing a disease like this deserve to find a cure, but knowing that the next child with relapsed Group 4 Medulloblastoma will face an equally bleak prognosis as Jess did, we had a particular motivation to try to further research in that area.

We have since been liaising with Professor Louis Chesler’s team at the Institute of Cancer Research about future research (Jess had already contributed to research projects at the ICR). The ICR team have made a groundbreaking discovery in that they have now discovered a potentially targetable mutation unique to Jess’s type of cancer. Our current goal is therefore to support their new ‘Targeting SRC in Group 4 Medulloblastoma’ PhD project, a four year project by Claudia Besali (supervised by Dr Gary Newton and Dr Rob van Montfort). The more funding we can raise, the more laboratory processes can be run to maximise the scope of the project.

Claudia comments:”Our research has pinpointed a specific variant of a protein, which is uniquely expressed in a particular subtype of medulloblastoma. This discovery provides a new and highly specific target for future therapies. The core goal of my PhD project is to develop novel, targeted drugs that selectively block the activity of only this cancer-specific protein variant, leaving healthy cells untouched. We will first study the protein variant itself in the laboratory to understand how it behaves and then use medicinal chemistry techniques to design and test potential new therapies. Ultimately, the goal is to translate these findings into more effective and less harmful treatments for young patients who are battling this challenging disease.”

23/11/2025

Welcome to Jessie’s Argonauts. We are a charitable organisation dedicated to increasing awareness of children’s brain tumours and raising funding for research that could lead to kinder, more effective treatments. The charity is set up in memory of Jessica Brown who tragically died aged nine years from an incurable relapsed brain tumour. Our hope is that in the future other children and families may have happier outcomes. Brain tumour research has been underfunded for decades and survival rates for brain tumours have improved very little when compared to many other cancers. For those that do survive, there are often lasting side effects to contend with, not just from surgery but from the harshness of the treatment itself.
Jess was a kind, generous soul who made the most of what little time she had, but she deserved so much more. In life she always wanted to make others feel better. Her death from a relapsed Medulloblastoma brain tumour in 2024 has left a wound in our lives that can never heal, and she will be forever missed. We aim to play a part in making a change towards another family, one day, not having to hear the devastating words ‘there’s nothing we can do.’

Address

Whitstable

Telephone

+447749981329

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