An Omokoroa school teacher is in Melbourne this week, starting a third fight against acute lymphoblastic leukaemia.

Her pupils are back home raise money and awareness of her journey in receiving a new immunotherapy drug not available in New Zealand.

Omokoroa No 1 School teacher Leanne Thompson with her Room 14 class.

Leanne Thompson will receive drug Blincyto under compassionate consideration, meaning she doesn't pay for the drug but still requires about $145,000 to make the trip to Australia.

When Leanne first learnt of her second relapse against leukaemia in early-March this year, she disappeared from her Room 14 classroom overnight.

But her Room 14 pupils of Omokoroa No1 School stepped into action, starting to fundraise to help Leanne receive treatment, first selling fruit and last Saturday held a fundraiser at the school.

A Givealittle page was set up – and has so far raised more than $25,000 for Leanne.

'I am just so overwhelmed and grateful and thankful,” Leanne told SunLive before she left NZ on Saturday to receive her first treatment of Blincyto.

'I'm not one to ask for money so it's unbelievable – it's blown me away,” says the 35-year-old.

Leanne was first diagnosed with leukaemia in 2007 at age 26 and received chemotherapy to treat the cancer.

She relapsed in 2014 after seven years 'which was a bit of a pain” and received more chemotherapy and a bone marrow transplant in 2015.

'That was with an unrelated donor – a guy from Australia. So I spent three months up in Auckland in hospital recovering from that.

'From that, 97 per cent of his marrow took over mine – I call it my ‘man marrow',” says Leanne.

She's also suffered from breast cancer, in 2012, and underwent a mastectomy and reconstruction.

Then at the start of March 2016 she had a routine blood test. 'They noticed my platelet count – the cells that stop you from bleeding – had basically halved. Sometimes with transplants that can happen.”

That didn't improve in further blood tests, so Leanne had a bone marrow biopsy.

'Sure enough my marrow was filled with leukaemia again. 'The next day I started weekly chemotherapy for four weeks which involved 10 minutes of the chemotherapy drug and three hours of fluid to try to kill off the cells to make room for my blood cells to keep working while they found something else to help me.”

But further treatment options in NZ are limited, so her haematologist asked contacts around the world.

'Melbourne [doctors] said they'd finished their trials with Blincyto and the drug company had started to fund it.”

To fund the treatment herself Leanne would have had to pay $254,000 but treatment has been offered under compassionate consideration

However, hospital, medical and associated living costs will still cost $145,000 – a big ask when both her and husband Gavin cannot work.

Leanne says the drug is specifically for people like her who keep falling into relapse.

'Immunotherapy is to get you back into remission – which they think is achieved at quite a high rate – then possibly I can have another bone marrow transplant after that.

'When or where that will happen is a big fat question mark.”

Asked how she feels about making a third fight to kick the disease, Leanne says: 'It's a bit of everything”.

'It's scary but it's also exciting – it is basically stepping into the unknown. I don't know – I have so many emotions going through my head.”

Leanne has been a teacher at Omokoroa No1 School for about 10 years, when not receiving cancer treatments, and had just started back in 2016 after time off.

Leanne's Givealittle page closes on April 30. To help donate to her Australia trip, visit https://givealittle.co.nz/cause/leannethompsonfundraiser