Help shine a light on rare cancers this June
Every year, on 26th June it’s Rare Cancer Awareness Day – a day to unify and shine a light on rare cancers, helping Australia become more educated and aware of what rare cancers are.
Rare cancers are more common than you think – someone in Australia is diagnosed with a rare or less common cancer every 12 minutes - that’s 120 people a day1. For those diagnosed, it can feel particularly overwhelming, scary and lonely when they’re told they have a cancer no one has heard of or knows how to treat.
The focus of Rare Cancers Awareness Day is to help those diagnosed with these cancers to feel better understood and supported – to become more aware of rare.
What makes rare, rare?
Rare cancers make up hundreds of different types of cancer, each occurring in 6-12 people per 100,000 of the population in Asutralia. Individually they have small numbers, but collectively they make up roughly a quarter of all cancer diagnoses and a third of cancer-related deaths.1
Partnership to strengthen knowledge access
GenesisCare have just announced a partnership with Rare Cancers Australia (RCA). The funding from which aims to strengthen critical information sharing between patients and clinicians about treatment pathways and special access programs through two dedicated platforms – RCA Knowledge Base and Medicines Access Portal (MAP).
The RCA Knowledge Base brings together trusted information on more than 200 rare and less common cancer types giving patients and clinicians a single, reliable source of information. MAP complements this by providing an online portal that enables clinicians and oncology pharmacists to quickly identify compassionate access programs available to cancer patients across Australia.
Find out more about services offered to the rare cancer community:
Media contact information
Contact our media team directly for futher information:
- Rare Cancers Australia. (n.d.). Rare cancers. Retrieved October 2025, from https://www.rarecancers.org.au/rare-cancers
- Australian Institute of Health and Welfare. (2025, September 11). Overview. In Cancer data in Australia. Retrieved October 2025, from https://www.aihw.gov.au/reports/cancer/cancer-data-in-australia/contents/overview
