Adelaide family forced to crowdfund boy’s life-saving cancer therapy after unfulfilled promise

An Adelaide family has been forced to turn to strangers and crowdfunding to get life-saving cancer treatment abroad for their child.

The solution would be found in Adelaide, with a basement on North Terrace designed for a pioneering proton therapy unit, now filled only with a decade-old empty promise.

In 2024, Levi was diagnosed with stage four medulloblastoma, an aggressive and persistent brain tumor, which came as a shock to both the then nine-year-old and his mother Jade Elston.

“I cry a lot,” Elston told 9News.

“It just feels like a dream. You don’t know what to do, you just feel helpless as a mother.”

After years of some of the most powerful chemotherapy and radiation treatments, Levi was in remission – twice.

But now the 11-year-old’s cancer has returned.

“They did say that when children relapse with medulloblastoma, especially with this third relapse, they often clear,” Elston said.

“He’s been through a lot. He can barely walk to the toilet, he gets bloated when he walks to the toilet.”

The family’s only hope is a treatment called proton therapy, which is specifically aimed at treating childhood cancer.

“We need that specifically because there is no way to operate,” Elston said.

That treatment was promised for South Australia in 2016, with $500 million spent on the Bragg Center on North Terrace and its purpose-built bunker.

It was intended to house a machine that was never built.

“Let’s not assume that this program would have been in place now if there had not been a delay,” government spokesman Tom Koutsantonis told 9News.

SA’s Health Research Institute took the machine’s developer to court and won back $35 million last month over the failed contract.

But that is little consolation for the Elston family, who are now forced to make a crowdfunding trip abroad to Singapore for the life-saving treatment.

Federal Health Minister Mark Butler was not available to answer questions but told 9News he is now exploring other states to potentially host a proton therapy machine.

Whatever happens, Elston has this message for politicians.

“Pull your head in and get it fixed, kids are losing lives,” she said.

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