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The notion of a basic-science laboratory focusing a significant part of its work on one patient is almost unheard of, said Dr. Erick Sell, the girl’s neurologist. He could point only to Lorenzo’s Oil, the treatment developed for another rare neurological disease at the urging of one American patient’s father — and the name of a Hollywood movie about the saga.

But Prof. Bennett said she is simply applying the “unique skill set” of her lab and its dozen researchers to help out a child she has known since birth, as she said anyone would do.

We don’t have much time and this needs time

“I told my team about this situation and the whole group has been willing to put in late-night shifts to do all we can to speed up the research,” she said in an email interview. “[But] we don’t have much time and this needs time … We may be too late — India is very, very ill.

Mark Taylor and his wife, Lesley Buxton, have set up a website — onestrong.org — to raise money for the Neural Regeneration Laboratory, which says this research could be applied more widely, too. The news they received Thursday about their daughter’s prognosis, though, could not have been worse.

India grew up as a normal, healthy child, taking riding lessons, doing gymnastics and learning to sing in a voice that, her parents say, “could send shivers up and down your spine.”

The first sign that something was amiss came in 2007, at age 10, when she would fall down every day on her way to the beach on a Cape Breton vacation.

She’s seeing things, hearing things. She’s pretty much terrified

She was later diagnosed with epileptic seizures that have only grown worse and more resistant to medication and other treatments.