Charlie’s Rainbow 2025

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Adelaide, South Australia, Australia

Donations are 100% tax deductible

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Cancer Australia: We have had a very successful year with a major grant application to Cancer Australia being funded to the tune of $600,000 over 3 years. This has been a major boost to our collaborative efforts with the ZERO Childhood Cancer programme, the Childhood Cancer Institute in Sydney and Dr Andy Moore from Queensland. In this study we will investigate the role of inherited mutations in childhood AML including predisposition to the disease and the implications for treatment with the goal of improving the clinical management and outcomes.

Our interactions with families affected by childhood AML were really important for this application, and we are so grateful for Kelly’s input and the support and involvement from Charlie’s Rainbow – these were key factors in us getting a high score for this application.

Inner Wheel Australia: In October 2024 we were notified of a successful grant from Inner Wheel Australia to investigate the use of immune therapy for childhood AML.

They are an amazing group of women who have supported research on cord blood nationally for many years and they are very excited about supporting this childhood AML project. The $65,000 that we receive with this grant will allow us to perform critical experiments that are needed to develop the most suitable approach for childhood AML immune therapy using cord blood cells.

Cops For Kids: In June, 2024, Cops For Kids has generously donated over $36,000 to fund the equipment needed by the Centre for Cancer Biology (CCB) researchers to manipulate live cancer cells and immune cells, enabling them to test and optimise these new therapies. The Cops For Kids Tissue Culture Facility will contribute enormously to the development of lifesaving treatments for childhood brain and blood cancers.

Saumya Samaraweera is extending her collaboration with the ZERO Childhood Cancer Programme and is in training for clinical curation of genetic information that is gathered from patients. Once her training is complete, she will have the skills to contribute to the clinical reporting of genetic alteration within the ZERO study.

Our student, Bhumika Tirthani whose PhD project is supported by Charlie’s Rainbow has had a massive year in 2024, generating a large amount of data on cord blood immune cells. This work provided the basis for the work funded by Inner Wheel. Through her studies we are gaining a better understanding of the potential effectiveness of immune cells sourced from cord blood as a treatment for AML patients.

We are also very excited to welcome two new lab Members (Luis Arriola and Simon Mandel) on the childhood AML projects. These two new appointments have been made possible by the support from Charlie’s Rainbow and with the success of these two new grants. Both new appointments have settled into to the lab really well and are already making important contributions to the childhood AML studies.

But we don’t want to stop there! Your fundraising will help support these positions to continue this vital research, and every month we fund will enable new understanding and discoveries.

Please join Charlie’s Rainbow’s MOVE CHALLENGE again in 2025 and help raise much-needed funds to fight this insidious disease together. To register as a fundraiser, click MOVE CHALLENGE. Then, please email us or message us at facebook.com/charliesrainbowaml to receive your links and ongoing support and communications.

Charlie was 17 months old when he was diagnosed with Acute Myeloid Leukaemia (AML). Charlie passed away when he was only three years old.

His family have established Charlie’s Rainbow in his honour, and partnered with the University of South Australia (UniSA), to raise funds for paediatric cancer research at the University.

Continue to read more below from Charlie’s mum, Kelly, who has bravely shared their story.

I’m Kelly. From the moment Charlie was born my two boys were inseparable. They were both little menaces, always into everything, but watching them together just made my heart sing.

He often had a snotty nose and watery eyes, but we just put it down to him building up his immune system just like our other son had done – and so many other children his age. Little did we know this was the beginning of our heartbreaking journey.

Three months later, Charlie developed a small lesion on his eye. After multiple scans and tests, he was diagnosed with AML. To say we were shocked is an understatement. These things happen to other people who you hear about in stories and in movies. I bet that’s what everyone else in this cancer world says. Well it did happen to us, and it happened to our precious Charlie.

He endured a gruelling 18 months of intense treatment. There were times the medical team thought we were going to lose him but he powered through it all, happily playing, and laughing. Charlie really loved the medical staff; they were his friends because he was isolated from the rest of the world due to the risk of infection.

In January 2020 Charlie got to ring the bell in celebrating the end of treatment. He spent the next six months in remission before he relapsed, not only in his bone marrow but also in his spinal fluid.

There were a group of doctors that said he was incurable and that they wouldn’t treat him, but thankfully our medical team were persistent and wouldn’t take no for an answer. By this stage the blasts were spilling out of his bone marrow and showing in his blood tests, and now his gums were also infiltrated with the leukaemia.

We relocated to Victoria for his bone marrow transplant, leaving our four year old son back home with his grandparents as he wasn’t allowed in the hospital due to the COVID-19 restrictions in Melbourne.

We travelled back to Adelaide a week before Charlie passed. He was able to enjoy five days in his own home, with his own toys, and sleep on his fire engine bed again.

Friends and family came to say their goodbyes and in his last hours the four of us as a family, held his hand, read his favourite story, told him how much we loved him, how proud we were of him, and that it was now ok for him to rest.

This has been the most gut wrenching journey and we don’t want any other family to have to go through what we went through. There are too many children losing their lives to this devastating childhood disease. The only way we are going to improve outcomes for them is through research.

We looked throughout Australia to find research into childhood AML so that we could support in Charlie’s honour and discovered UniSA’s Acute Leukaemia Laboratory working on several different research projects.

We heard from talented researchers about their work and have chosen to initally support Professor Richard D’Andrea’s research into relapse for children with AML.

Please donate and support Professor Richard D’Andrea and his colleagues to investigate what causes relapse by looking at the cells and DNA in relapse AML specimens to see what has changed since treatment.

Once this has been established, they can then identify ways to target precisely what’s gone wrong, so that bespoke treatment options can be considered for the child together with the standard therapies, or as an alternative treatment.

Important progress has been made. You can read more about the rare genetic anomaly linked to 20% of childhood AML cases here.

$70 – an hour of research

$700 – a full day of research

$1000 – specialised testing kit for AML cell

$2000 – growth media required for laboratory culture of leukemia cells

$5000 – analysis of the protein profile of AML samples

$10,000 – bioinformatic and computational biology analysis

$15,000 – a visiting researcher from a top 100 university to collaborate with the team on the project for 5 weeks. UniSA will match the funding for a second visiting researcher, and the fellowship will be promoted in your name

$120,000 – salary of one PhD researcher who will focus 100% of their time on this project

You can be assured that 100% of your donation will go directly towards research at the University of South Australia.

Thank you,

In honour of our beautiful Charlie, we love you and miss you every single day.

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