Leo Giancola lost his mom Ivette Giancola to neuroendocrine cancer when he was still in kindergarten. While his memories of her at that age are spotty, he still remembers her laugh.
“It was kind of crazy, but it was funny,” he says.. His father, Chris, adds: “She was known for her laugh. She had a beautiful smile.”
Ivette grew up in Lima, Peru, the daughter of a man from the mountains who had become a lawyer, and a family that had built something from nothing. She earned an engineering degree, then came to the United States for her Master’s degree. She was, by all accounts, a calm, reassuring, and patient presence. “She seemed to have somehow figured it all out,” Chris says.
In 2012, when Leo was just over a year old, the family was in Lima celebrating his first birthday with Ivette’s relatives. Near the end of the trip, she started feeling off, with stomach discomfort and bloating. While these symptoms are usually easy to explain away on vacation, by the time they were boarding their flight home, she knew something was really wrong.
After a month of uncertainty, doctors at Memorial Sloan Kettering confirmed her diagnosis as pancreatic neuroendocrine cancer (Pan-NETs), an uncommon cancer with few treatment options at the time.
“The whole time she was being treated,” Chris recalls, “there was never a single combination of anything — never a drug — that was specifically for pancreatic neuroendocrine cancer.” Everything was experimental. Everything was off-label. And yet Ivette faced it without bitterness. She often listened sympathetically as others complained of their everyday problems, offering a kind word, never letting on what she was carrying. “She was there to serve,” Chris says.
Ivette died in April 2016 when Leo was just 5 years old.
Supporting the Search for Cures
Now 15, Leo is a busy sophomore at a competitive private high school in New York City. He enjoys sports, coding, and teaching himself game design and software development. He hopes to attend MIT.
Leo also started a small business a few years ago called “Leo’s Crafts.” Initially, he sold handmade bookmarks, and grew from there into custom-designed journals. Leo designs the covers and interiors and then sends his designs to a professional manufacturer in New Jersey to print and bind. He then sells his creations online through Facebook and at local craft fairs.
Leo has been donating a portion of the proceeds to NETRF, which he identified as the right choice after researching where a donation focused specifically on neuroendocrine cancer research could make an impact.
“I want to contribute to the research,” he says simply, “so that this doesn’t have to happen — so people get to still be with their loved ones.”
Chris describes watching his son navigate all of this with a mix of pride and wonder. “He does it because it’s important to him,” he says. “He’s realized he’s been able to do something good in the world. And it’s not easy. It takes sacrifice.”
Continuing Ivette’s Legacy
Continuing Ivette’s LegacyIn the last year of Ivette’s life, she participated in a basket trial at Memorial Sloane Kettering: at the time, a cutting-edge study that matched treatments not to a specific cancer type, but to a specific genetic mutation. The trial kept her alive for that final year. When her treatment options ran out and Chris and Ivette sat together and understood that hospice was the next conversation, Ivette told her husband not to give up.
“She said, ‘Don’t worry, we’re going to keep trying. We’ll keep looking. There are more alternative treatments,'” Chris remembers. “Two and a half weeks before she died, she’s being told there’s nothing else, and she’s saying, ‘We’re not going to give up.'”
In the same spirit, Leo is not giving up on supporting the search for cures for neuroendocrine cancer through his fundraising efforts for NETRF.
“I just want to be able to contribute a little,” he says. “Give back.”
Ivette would undoubtedly be very proud.
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Learn how you can support the future of neuroendocrine cancer research through community fundraising or by making a gift.