The life and times of Col Reynolds
2025-01-06
A wrong turn while driving a coach kickstarted Col Reynolds’ journey to find a cure for childhood cancer.
It was the late 1980s when Col had finished taking visitors around Sydney on one of his sightseeing tours. On his way back to the depot, he headed the wrong way and ended up adjacent to the Sydney Children’s Hospital in Camperdown. He gave way at a crossing to two young, bald kids with cancer, which prompted him to park the bus and head inside.
Struck by their condition, it altered the course of his life forever. Some five million kilometres in a bus circumnavigating the continent had led him to his destination.
Stirred by the character of the doctors and patients he met during his impulsive meeting; he vowed to help kids with cancer in any way he could.
Col first began taking kids on the coaches on excursions to try and lift their spirits, purely out of his own back pocket. Tickets to the footy, trips to the zoo and ice cream orders at McDonald’s were a constant.
The Oncology Children’s Foundation (OCF) was founded by Col in 1993, known today as The Kids’ Cancer Project. The OCF was initially focused on cancer care, improving the life of a child while they received therapy, but Col’s relationship with the doctors within the wards – along with attending far too many funerals – put him on a different path.
It was at that point that Col began raising money for childhood cancer research. He camped out at shopping centres and sold raffle tickets. He organised concerts, with proceeds funnelled straight into research, in an effort to alter the lives of kids with cancer.
With Col’s funding, research facilities went from quasi-classrooms to high-tech establishments. Magnifying glasses, used to determine how much chemotherapy a patient should be administered, were scrapped in favour of stringent laboratory tests. Test tubes and hospital-grade laboratory equipment became commonplace.
Col was awarded a Medal of the Order of Australia (OAM) in 2000. A year later, with the help of a fundraising firm that helped with telemarketing efforts, Col and the OCF raised their first $1 million for childhood cancer research.
Col's greatest achievement was fostering an unlikely friendship with Professor Peter Gunning, a renowned Australian researcher.
In 1998, Gunning initiated a study on the protein tropomyosin and found that targeting the protein could kill neuroblastoma cells without harming healthy ones. This breakthrough led to the development of a groundbreaking drug in 2009.
It was a worldwide breakthrough. The findings made the cover of the prestigious Cancer Research Journal. Without Col’s funding, the research would not have been possible.
Since 2005, The Kids’ Cancer Project has funded over $75 million in childhood cancer research projects.
Col, now based in Townsville, walked the Kokoda Trail in 2016 at 77-years-old and sits on The Kids’ Cancer Project’s Board of Directors.
He says he ‘isn’t going anywhere’ until a cure for all kids’ cancers is found.
Col's dream was for no child to die from cancer. Now it's ours too.