Hollywood stars Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney have donated £20,000 to help a four-year-old girl battling a rare brain tumour. The actors, who co-own Welsh club Wrexham FC, stepped in after hearing about the plight of little Aria Hodgkiss. Their generous donations of £10,000 each helped her GoFundMe account exceed its £60,000 target this weekend.
Aria, from Wrexham, was diagnosed with Diffuse Intrinsic Pontine Glioma (DIPG) – an inoperable form of brain cancer that does not respond well to chemotherapy – on her third birthday last year. Only 40 children in the UK are diagnosed with it each year, and the average life expectancy is just nine months after diagnosis, with only 1% of children surviving five years.
It currently costs £4,000 a month to pay for the treatment that keeps Aria alive. But her family hope the fundraiser will help pay for a new cancer drug called ONC201 that could help save her life. Aria’s mum Melanie first noticed something was wrong in 2020 when her daughter became “really clumsy” and kept “falling over her own feet”. After a series of referrals, an MRI scan revealed a tumour on Aria's brainstem and a large amount of fluid.
Doctors put a shunt in Aria's brain to drain the fluid, which operates constantly to stop any build-up. They advised the family to “make memories” while they could, predicting that the young girl had just nine to 12 months to live despite starting radiotherapy. Although Aria has already lived longer than experts predicted, the family still hold out hope of finding a breakthrough.
This week Aria will travel to Disneyland Paris, which she is “super excited” about. When she returns, she will have an MRI scan followed by the results on August 30. “We can only pray and hope that she will be ok,” her family wrote in an update on her GoFundMe page.
