Australian Story: Mar 3

Monday night’s Australian Story looks at how an unlikely alliance between a coach driver and a scientist has resulted in a major breakthrough in the race to cure cancer.

“There are an enormous number of these new ideas coming out but this one created a lot of interest. It’s a high risk venture but – if it works – you’ve made a great impact on a disease that’s still one of the biggest killers around the world.” Prof Ian Olver, Cancer Council of Australia

Col Reynolds reckons he’s covered more than five million miles criss-crossing the country as a long distance tour coach driver.

But it’s his parallel path into the cutting edge world of “high-risk” cancer research that has delivered him right where he’s been aiming – at the brink of a major breakthrough in curing childhood cancer.

The charity he formed, The Kids Cancer Project, has to date pumped $20 million dollars into research into how to destroy Australia’s biggest killer of children from disease.

But when he was the subject of a 1998 AUSTRALIAN STORY episode, Col Reynolds had gone through a messy marriage break-up and estrangement from his kids.

A chance sighting of two bald-headed children outside a Sydney hospital cancer clinic led him to volunteer and before long he became a fixture at the Children’s Hospital Westmead, taking busloads of children out of hospital for the day as a break away from their chemotherapy treatment.

He realised that taking the kids on outings wouldn’t save them so he started a charity and began organising fund-raisers and selling car raffle tickets in shopping centres to raise money for research towards a cure.

Col Reynolds was introduced to Prof Peter Gunning who was pursuing “high risk” research into cancer cell architecture and the two became something of “an odd couple”, united by their mutual passion “to cure childhood cancer”.

With the backing of Col’s charity, years of study resulted in Prof Gunning identifying a key component of the cancer cell that could be targeted and potentially destroyed – most critically, without damaging normal, healthy cells.

Now that breakthrough is being hailed around the world…

8pm Monday on ABC1.