Three years ago, the Cure For Life Foundation was a 10-year old, three-person organisation that raised less than $4 million a year. With no government funding, brand positioning or recognition, and a brain cancer research community operating in silos — which they later found out held back advances in research—Cure For Life Foundation decided to think big and transform itself into a global influencer. The newly-branded Cure Brain Cancer Foundation now wanted to increase brain cancer’s five-year survival to 50% by 2023.

In a few short years, Cure Brain Cancer held global think tanks, mapped the cancer research system and formed global collaborations. They slowed down in order to speed up and created conclusions and goals. They discovered that to change outcomes for brain cancer patients they needed to reorganise ways of working, re-engineer the system, and repurpose treatments. To change ways of working they needed to change their environments, mindset and organisational behaviours. They discovered that to achieve their mission it would not only take science, but their whole system approach and a rally of change agents, funders, clinicians, researches, enablers and patients. In order to do all these things, they needed to connect the world and collaborate.

Three years on from the beginning of their new journey, Cure Brain Cancer Foundation now has global reach and has 28 employees with people with brain cancer at the centre of all that they do. They are a founding member of a key global alliance set to radically change systems, mindsets and protocols in brain cancer research. Cure Brain Cancer have gone from funding one lab in 2012, to funding 23 research programs in 2016. They have set up innovative funding streams that fast track funding, invested over $2.84 million in world-class research in the past year and have committed to an additional $9.54 million.

Cure Brain Cancer have collaborated with over 40 institutions spanning five continents to find the most promising projects, including first class clinical trials, giving Australians with brain cancer early access to promising treatments now rather than in another 30 years. They are seeing real treatment options for people with brain cancer, with the launch of four new clinical trials for brain cancer in Australia, for both children and adults.