The Children's Cancer Institute of Australia for Medical Research (CCIA) launched the two-month long fundraiser in Brisbane on Sunday, with hopes of raising 10 million Australian dollars (US$8.8 million) and employing 80 new world-class researchers.
CCIA executive chairman Joe Collins said childhood cancer survival rates had improved dramatically over the years and 70 percent of children now survived a cancer diagnosis.
But death rates were still too high and the lifetime complications from treatment, including deafness and infertility, were devastating, he said.
"There is about 500 kids diagnosed with children's cancer every year in Australia and of those 500 we have about three kids dying of childhood cancer every single week," Australian Associated Press quoted Collins as said.
"We have to keep the momentum for medical research going and we have to eventually solve that problem of those children dying," he said, adding the institute hoped that in the lifetime of a child born by 2020, there would be a cure for cancer.
Australian Treasurer Wayne Swan, himself a cancer survivor, officially launched the fundraiser and called on the community to support the institute, whose 100-odd scientists have been behind some groundbreaking discoveries since it was set up in 1976.
"It's one thing to be diagnosed with cancer when you're in your40s or 50s, as I was, but it's an entirely different thing when somebody young is diagnosed with cancer," he told attendees.
"Those of us who've been diagnosed who've had a fair crack at life, you can be a little more philosophical about it but the raw injustice of a young person with all of their life ahead of them is something different all together," Swan said.
(Xinhua News Agency September 1, 2008)