The family of Southampton rock star Greg Gilbert have vowed to battle on in his fight against cancer after they were given devastating news.

Delays frontman Greg has been told that the pioneering cancer treatment he is raising money for will only prolong his life by a couple of weeks.

Greg’s family have refused to give up hope and have now gone back to the drawing board, looking at other alternative treatments.

But this means they will need to raise an estimated £250,000 - another £100,000 on top of what they have already managed to collect so far.

Since Greg’s partner issued an appeal for help to keep her family together, thousands of friends and fans from across the globe rallied together to raise money for an alternative treatment, not available on the NHS, and which they believed would be his only chance at seeing his two baby daughters grow up.

Pop stars Ellie Goulding and Southampton’s Craig David also donated to the appeal  while a number of fund raising concerts have taken place across the city.

The Southampton rock star was diagnosed with stage four bowel cancer and secondary lung cancer just before Christmas and was told by surgeons they could not help him.

Greg, 39, was also told chemotherapy, which he is in his fourth round of, will not help to get rid of the disease.

As well as this, results from tests analysing Greg’s genetics revealed he had a mutated gene which meant immunotherapy treatment would not work on him.

The couple’s plan was to use the money raised so far to pay for a drug called Avastin which targets cancerous cells and boosts the immune system.

Greg’s partner Stacey Heale said: “There are lots of different drugs to train the immune system to fight cancer on its own but because of Greg’s genetics it means they would be useless for him - it leaves us in a tricky situation.

“We raised the money to pay for this treatment and we can’t guarantee it will work and if it does it will only give him an extra couple of weeks which is a real blow.

“It’s taken time to regroup – when we first found out I fell apart and lost the plot, after the real high of raising the money and feeling so lifted from the goodwill of people and thinking there was hope, I really crashed.

“We don’t know where we can go from here, so we are going back to the drawing board.”

Stacey said immunotherapy was the new “big deal” in cancer care.

“As big of an amount as it is, we always knew £100,000 would maybe not cover everything we needed,” she said.

“We are looking at other drugs and therapies but the more specialised and cutting edge it is the more expensive it is.”

Stacey said they had not asked how long Greg had left to live because they did not want to know.

She added they were determined to find an alternative cutting edge treatment and raising the money needed to pay for it.

“It is very abstract to think about raising a quarter of million pounds I can’t get my head around what I am doing on a daily basis I just know I have to keep going and pushing,” she said.

“I just have to keep fighting for everything I can do to give us a chance.”

Professor Peter Johnson, Cancer Research UK’s chief clinician and head of Southampton’s Cancer Research UK Centre, said: “We have been making steady progress against bowel cancer: finding ways of getting it diagnosed earlier by screening; developing more effective surgery; using new ways of giving radiotherapy.

“We have a stream of new types of treatment coming through, but unfortunately not all of them work well enough to be good value for the NHS to buy for everyone.

“Some of the treatments that only have a small effect or only work for a few people are not funded routinely by the NHS, which has to make difficult decisions about how best to use its limited money.

“We hope that by continuing our research we can find treatments that work better, and which will be good enough for them to be routinely available.”

Visit gofundme.com/give4greg to support Greg’s cause.