The Brain Cancer Collective is the fundraising arm of Brain Cancer Biobanking Australia - raising funds to accelerate brain cancer research.
Brain cancer kills more children and adults under 40 than any other cancer, yet remains one of the most under-researched of all the cancer groups. Unlike most cancers, brain cancer survival rates have not improved significantly over the last 30 years and remain amongst the lowest of all cancer survival rates.
In the words of world expert in brain cancer research, Professor Timothy Cloughesy (UCLA).
“Australia has the potential to build the largest centralised registry of brain cancer tissue and data in the world and simply by allowing global access to that registry could do more than Europe or the US to advance brain cancer research”.
Each year BCBA needs $300,000 to support their operations
To make research breakthroughs and develop new treatments, scientists need to understand what drives these deadly tumours and for that they require access to large amounts of high quality tumour tissue and the associated data. Due to the nature of the disease, sufficient tissue samples are extremely hard to gather, which in turn has severely hampered research efforts.
Brain Cancer Biobanking Australia (BCBA) - a consortium of over 70 of Australia's leading paediatric and adult brain cancer clinicians and researchers - was established in 2015 to network Australia’s fragmented brain cancer biobanking operations in order to provide researchers globally with centralised access to the tissue and data they need to drive next generation brain cancer research. BCBA now acts as the virtual hub for a national network of 20 brain cancer biobanks and as an integrated platform to develop collaborative projects aimed at delivering better outcomes for brain cancer patients.
Current initiatives include a number of pioneering projects.
