Smitten, Kirsty, At the age of 29, a talented young scientist who developed a new class of Antibiotics that could save millions of lives and avert a medical disaster died. Kirsty Smitten was given only months to live after being diagnosed with heart cancer in February – a deadly condition that strikes only two individuals in the UK each year – and died in the first few hours on October 4th.

Before his death, he had been getting treatment at Birmingham’s Queen Elizabeth Hospital for seven weeks. During her final hours, her family was by her side. “Kirsty fought until the end, but this was such an aggressive fight,” his sister-in-law Sukhi Smitten, wife of his older brother Matt,

But because this cancer was so aggressive, she couldn’t beat it. He continued telling her why she had to live: his brother Dan is getting married in November, and Matt and I are expecting our first child in February.

She would have made an excellent aunt. “We are all heartbroken.” The Solihull family was still reeling over the death of Smitten’s seemingly healthy father Kevin, 61, who died suddenly while playing football in Portugal in October, when they began to worry about his health.

Ms Smitten, who had been playing hockey and football every day, awoke in the middle of the night last November with agonising chest symptoms, The Mail On Sunday reported earlier this year. It took three months of testing for her to pass.

It took three months of testing before she was identified with cardiac angiosarcoma, a heart tumour. Kirsty knew that this type of tumour would come back and spread or explode, causing her heart to fail, and she hoped that she would survive long enough to find a solution.

Career

During the first months, the biochemist, doctor of chemistry, and 2020 member of Forbes magazine’s prestigious 30 Under 30 science and health list, continued to lead the fight against antimicrobial resistance, which the World Health Organisation called one of the most serious threats to global health, as bacteria, viruses, fungi, and parasites evolved over time and no longer respond to antibiotics.

Ms Smitten and her team at Metallo Bio, a company she founded with the help of her PhD supervisor at the University of Sheffield, developed two antibiotic compounds to treat bacterial infections, including strains of pneumonia and meningitis that have become resistant to commonly used antibiotics, as well as infections that develop in wounds and after surgery.

However, she has been unable to work in recent weeks due to difficulty breathing and walking around her hospital bed. His family is determined that his legacy, both in introducing a new class of antibiotics to the public and in raising awareness about cardiac angiosarcoma (he regularly posted on Tiktok and Instagram and encouraged other sufferers online), lives on after his death.