A Man On A Mission

By Jacob Casha

Ren Pedersen never planned to be involved in medicine. He never went to medical school. He never paid too much attention in science class.

But when he tragically lost his nine-year-old daughter Amy to Diffuse Intrinsic Pontine Glioma (DIPG) in 2009, he dove head-first into the medical world—not as a doctor, but as a father with a promise to keep.

"I promised my daughter that I would cure this,” says Ren.

“I just happened to pick the toughest fight in all of medicine.”

DIPG—also known as the deadliest childhood cancer—is an aggressive brain tumour that forms in the brainstem, affecting vital functions like breathing, movement, and heart rate. Most children diagnosed with DIPG survive only months.

No effective treatment exists. In fact, up until Amy’s death 16 years ago, no research into a cure for DIPG had ever been undertaken in Australia.

But where most saw an insurmountable challenge, Ren chose to fight tooth and nail for a cure that could save thousands.

A crane operator by trade and a Burdekin boy at heart, Ren grew up surrounded by small-town values—honesty, hard work, and doing what needed to be done. After losing Amy, those same values fuelled his leap into a world he never imagined stepping into. “I approached this with a blue-collar, crane driver’s mentality,” he says.

With an absence of fundamental DIPG research, it was up to him to get the ball rolling.

“We were really starting from scratch,” says Ren.

“They said, ‘We can’t do any research without autopsy samples.

“So the first thing I did was, with my contacts, I delicately approached the parents, and we consented to getting the children’s tumours debulked when the kids passed away.

“And so, for the first time ever in Australia, scientists had actual tumour samples to analyse.”

Thanks largely to Pedersen’s groundwork, Australia’s first DIPG tumour bank was created in 2011 at the Children’s Cancer Institute, under the leadership of Associate Professor David Ziegler.

Since then, the path has been all but linear, but made entirely possible thanks to Ren’s undying determination.

“I would literally go to the institutions and challenge the leading professors there,” says Ren.

“If the doctors said, ‘we can't do this or this’, I’d say, ‘well, what do you need to get this done?’”

Fast-forward to today, and Australian researchers have led the charge in DIPG research, with recent breakthroughs demonstrating that an accessible cure may be just over the horizon.

Despite promising updates, Ren knows the journey is far from complete.

“The next step is making sure these discoveries actually reach the kids who need them.”

His fundraising endeavour, ‘Ren’s Million Dollar Mission’, was born from this understanding. The charity aims to raise $1 million to support vital DIPG research at the Children’s Cancer Institute, focusing on apoptosis-targeting treatments and tumour microenvironment studies to develop new therapies.

“Once we get this million dollars up, we hope to gain momentum across Australia… and get this drug delivered into the mouths of these children, because helping parents save their children is what this is all about.”

Unfortunately, Ren couldn’t quite save Amy, but the OAM recipient says the journey for a cure has kept him connected to her, helping to fill the devastating void she left behind a decade and a half ago.

“This is like my child now,” says Ren.

“(I’ve watched) it grow and mature. We’ve nursed the baby up till it's about to walk, and now it's walking. We've just got to get the treatments that we've discovered to the bedside and watch the child blossom.”

And that’s the mission. Ren’s mission. Not an obligation, but a decision—to not only uphold his promise to Amy, but to ensure that children with DIPG can grow up to decide their own destiny, too.

You can play your part here: https://www.ccia.org.au/event/rens-million-dollar-mission/home

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Unfortunately, Ren couldn’t quite save Amy, but the OAM recipient says the journey for a cure has kept him connected
to her. Photo source: Facebook

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