10/10/2026
WHY XIT GOT INVOLVED. 🧬
Our involvement in this project began when we learned about Sid Sijbrandij, an entrepreneur diagnosed with osteosarcoma, who took an extraordinary approach to his own cancer treatment.
He went “founder mode” on cancer, bringing together scientists, researchers, and emerging technologies to develop a highly personalized treatment strategy, including cancer vaccines.
We watched him speak about his experience and found ourselves asking one question:
If a someone with the resources to accelerate his own treatment can do this, why can’t we create those same opportunities for children in our community?
We later learned about his support for Serova Bio and were particularly impressed by the scientific and medical expertise behind its work.
Serova Bio was co-founded by Michael E. Bryan, an MD-PhD researcher at the University of Oxford and affiliate scientist at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard.
The team also includes Dr. Jie Min (James) Lam, Chief Medical Officer, who studied medicine at the University of Cambridge and University College London Medical School.
What impressed us was not simply the scientific expertise behind the technology, but the team’s willingness to explore ways to bring emerging therapies to patients sooner.
Then something remarkable happened.
Families from our childhood cancer community, including parents of children with ewing sarcoma and osteosarcoma, began reaching out to XIT, asking whether we could help their children access this therapy.
And we knew this was exactly the kind of work XIT was created to do.
One of the greatest challenges in pediatric oncology isn’t simply discovering promising therapies. It’s getting them to children in time.
Traditional drug development and large clinical trials can take many years. For children with aggressive cancers, those years are often years they do not have.
What makes this collaboration particularly meaningful is Serova Bio’s willingness to provide access for children now.
With personalized vaccine manufacturing potentially taking approximately 12 weeks, this represents an opportunity to work on a timeline very different from conventional timelines.
These vaccines remain investigational. We do not yet know which children will benefit, or to what extent. But we believe that responsibly expanding access to promising science, while collecting and sharing clinical outcomes, is how progress can accelerate.
Serova Bio has proposed making personalized vaccine development available for up to 20 children through a $200,000 funded cohort.
For perspective, personalized treatment development can otherwise carry costs approaching that amount for a single patient.
Our goal at XIT is to help make this opportunity accessible to children who may benefit, without placing the financial burden on their families.
This is more than a fundraising initiative.
It is an opportunity to bring together scientists, oncologists, families, foundations, and donors to explore a different model for developing and accessing pediatric cancer therapies.
One that moves faster. One that learns from every patient. One that puts children at the center of innovation.
If you would like to help make this possible, you can donate at XIT.org, share this initiative with a foundation or potential donor, or organize a fundraiser within your own community.
This model also creates the opportunity to establish additional cancer-specific cohorts, expanding access to personalized vaccines across pediatric malignancies.
If your community or foundation would like to fundraise for a specific cancer cohort, please reach out to XIT! Together, we can help bring these promising therapies to more children.
Children deserve cures. And they deserve access to innovation now.
XIT.org
