MIRA Meme Coin Created to Fund Research for Rare Brain Tumor after Father Shares Daughter’s Diagnosis

After Siqi Chen shared a post about his daughter's brain tumor diagnosis, the crypto community created the meme coin MIRA to raise money for research funding.

A meme coin named MIRA, created by the crypto community to raise money for brain tumor research, has seen a rapid surge in value, accumulating a market cap of $72 million within minutes of its launch on pump.fun.

The Solana (SOL) -based token, named after the four-year old daughter of Runway co-founder and CEO Siqi Chen, has quickly gathered attention following Chen’s post about Mira being diagnosed with a rare brain tumor.

At the time of writing, the meme coin is up by 710% and is currently trading hands at $0.0768, with a trading volume of $16.4 million, according to data from DEX screener. The token has also reached a max price of $0.081 and a total supply of 952,373,000.

The token was created after Chen posted a thread on X users to help send donations to fund Dr. Todd Hankinson’s research. Hankinson is a professors of Neurosurgery and Pediatrics from the University of Colorado, who Chen claimed “runs the only lab in the world focusing on this tumor.”

“Though there is still no cure, with the help of our research team, we have already helped dr. Hankinson’s lab identify promising new drugs for Mira’s tumor. But we need your help,” wrote Chen in his post.

The thread reached more than 133,000 users, with many asking Chen to share his crypto wallet addresses, including Ethereum, Solana, and Bitcoin. Not long after, Chen stated that someone launched a meme coin named after his daughter on the Solana network to help raise money for the brain tumor research.

Afterward, the token developer sent Chen half of its entire supply, which is valued at around $400,000 at the time. However, Chen expressed hesitation in selling the tokens because he does not want to rug pull the people who invested in the meme coin, despite people in the comments saying they donated their funds to MIRA willingly.

In the end, Chen declared that he plans to sell 10% of the supply and use 5% of the tokens for Hankinson Lab research, which is around $49,263. He intends to hold onto the other 5%, adding that he will not be selling more than that without a 24-hour prior notice.

He also clarifies that all proceeds will go to funding research for the rare brain tumor at Hankinson Lab and that his family will not receive a single cent from the token.

“I just want to say that whoever said crypto has no legitimate use cases, you can tell them that funding for rare disease research is a pretty legitimate use case,” said Chen.