Kathleen Buckley is the President of the Team Sanfilippo Foundation. At the age of 8, Buckley’s son Matthew was diagnosed with a terminal illness called Sanfilippo syndrome. Occurring in only one of every 70,000 births, Sanfilippo syndrome is rare- so rare that most pharmaceutical companies can’t profit providing services to the population and treatment plans aren’t clearly defined. Children diagnosed with the disease have a life expectancy of 10-20 years, eventually go blind, need feeding tubes and are bound to wheelchairs in the final years of their life.

So in 2007, with only a few thousand dollars, Buckley founded the Team Sanfilippo Foundation and began doing everything in her power to prolong and better the quality of her son’s life, including enrolling her family in karate.

Share

Discuss in Social Wall

Share to rareTeam

Bookmark