The Cure Brain Cancer Foundation is a charity organization in Australia that works for the promotion of cancer research in the state. It was established to recognize the need raise awareness about brain cancer among people. The key objectives of the Foundation include the funding of research projects for brain cancer that provide patients with an opportunity to access advanced treatments with promising results. It aims to raise the revenue for research from the year 2012 to 2015 to $20 million and invest in research as much as $12 million during this time period. This research would allow people to learn more about the brain cancer that has killed more children in Australia than any other disease. It has also killed adults of age less than 40 years in the country.
According to the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, one person is diagnosed with Brain Cancer every five hours in Australia. The survival rate is very low. Only two people from ten are having brain cancers who manage to survive in five years. Despite this high mortality rate, very little is spent for research in brain cancer treatment and diagnosis. The treatment is very difficult since it involves the most important and sensitive organ of the body and costs more on treatment than any other cancer.
Mission:
The mission of the organization is to increase the brain cancer survival rate to 50% within ten years.
History:
The Cure Brain Cancer Foundation was founded in 2001 by a well known neurosurgeon Prof Charlie Teo that has since then extended across Australia and the world. It has since then been engaged in a lot of fund raising activities to undertake research projects to find innovative and advanced ways for the treatment of brain cancer. It was initially named Cure for Life Foundation until the change of its name in 2014. The Cure Brain Cancer Foundation is going against the status quo and norms set by the researchers and medical persons in the field and focus not on the question of ‘Why?’ but rather ‘why not?’ and ‘how can we?’ they promote advanced thinking and innovative ideas for greater partnerships and renewed methods for the treatment of brain cancer globally. They go to limits that are not crossed yet by other scientists in the field and hence expect extraordinary outcomes for their unmatched efforts.
Research:
The Cure Brain Cancer Foundation has funded a large number of research projects of innovative and advanced nature ranging from the migration of tumour cells in the brain and the development of new treatments for cancer with improved results. The Foundation has set up a four key research areas that it believes will help it to reach its mission and fill the significant knowledge gaps in the field of brain cancer. The points are the following:
Collaborative Translational Research: This will help the Foundation to skip the traditional pathway in research when they will know that other scientists have found out something similar. They aim to create a collective and collaborative research group with specialists in the other related fields like bioinformatics, genomics, nanotechnology and oncology. This helps in the sharing of knowledge, expertise and resources to avoid duplication in research and increasing the effectiveness, pace and efficiency of the research. Since the Foundation believes that collective brain power can yield more outcomes than individual efforts.
Clinical Research: The Foundation promotes clinical trials on cancer patients in Australia so they don’t have to travel to other countries for trial and experimentation of new drugs and cancer treatments. This would speed up the pace of research and is a better way for provision of prompt medication to patients.
Immunotherapy: Australia has a lot of potential in research related to immunology. The Foundation prefers to fund these bright minds to research in brain cancer immunology to achieve significant outcomes for patients.
Precision Medicine: The Foundation wants to devise a system that would enable personalized medicine and individual screening for tumors and specialized treatment methods for each cancer case. Since it is not yet possible for the doctors to treat each cancer patient individually based on their differences and peculiarities, the foundation wants to fund a research project that would allow the doctors to study each case differently and separately and advice treatment and medication to the each patient based on their biomarkers. Biomarkers are molecules that help the doctors to understand important issues about a patient’s cancer. They are present in tissues and body fluids and help in the diagnosis of brain cancer and tell the doctors preferable treatment for each patient.
The Cure Brain Cancer Foundation is thus an organization with a dedicated aim to decrease the rate of cancer mortality by increasing the advancement in cancer research that would open up new ways in the treatment of brain cancer in children and adults throughout the world.
