A quarter of a century of charity. 850 million DKK raised, and tangible progress in the treatment of critically ill children. This is the story of the concrete results Team Rynkeby has helped create across Europe – not least in Denmark and Finland, where the partnership with Team Rynkeby has meant “everything,” according to Laura Paasio, founder of the Finnish childhood cancer foundation, AAMU.

Laura Paasio had just become a mother for the third time when the need to view family and working life from a new perspective slowly began to emerge.

With a long and busy career in the financial sector behind her, she began to consider how she could best bring her knowledge and experience from the financial world into a new chapter — one that could help change the world for the better.

- I needed a different kind of meaning in my life. At the same time, I became aware that the childhood cancer field was underfunded and lacked the resources to secure research funding that could make a difference. That led me to establish the Finnish Children’s Cancer Foundation in 2013, which was named AAMU.

AAMU means “morning” in Finnish, and according to Laura Paasio, the foundation’s name represents its goal: to give children in Finland diagnosed with cancer a new chance, a new beginning — and thereby the best possible opportunities to overcome their illness and live a healthy adult life.

- At that time, treatment for Finnish children with cancer was at risk of falling behind compared to treatment in other developed countries — there was simply a funding gap that could eventually negatively impact children’s treatment, says Laura Paasio.

Back then, the survival rate for childhood cancer in Finland was 81 percent — meaning four out of five children survived their illness. A survival rate which at the time was still slightly better than in many other Western countries.

No strong tradition of charity donations

Although AAMU invested many volunteer hours, it wasn’t until 2017, when Laura Paasio began working with Team Rynkeby, that the breakthrough finally came.

- Team Rynkeby has meant everything for AAMU — and therefore also for the many children who are diagnosed with cancer in Finland every year, says Laura Paasio, adding:

- Finland is a country without a strong tradition of donating money to charity. That’s a challenge Team Rynkeby has helped us overcome. The concept has proven to work, and the collaboration has saved us many years of hard work trying to engage Finnish businesses, raise awareness of childhood cancer, and highlight the underfunding in the field.

Over the years, Team Rynkeby has raised just under 8.3 million euros in Finland, half of which has gone to the AAMU Foundation. This season, 300 Finnish participants are once again ready to get on their bikes, but it is not only the funds they raise that make a difference for childhood cancer research in Finland.

- You could say that the cooperation with Team Rynkeby has put a spotlight on children with cancer in a way we could never have achieved alone. It has given us a ‘fast track’ in our fundraising — something that has proven invaluable, says Laura Paasio.

Today, around half of AAMU’s total fundraising comes from Team Rynkeby’s activities.

The international breakthrough

To truly understand the difference the funds raised by Team Rynkeby have made across all the countries where the organisation is active, one must also look at how international collaboration has helped strengthen childhood cancer research — not only in Finland and Denmark but across Europe.

A journey that Professor Kjeld Schmiegelow, childhood cancer specialist at Rigshospitalet, has been part of from the beginning.

Kjeld Schmiegelow received the first childhood cancer professorship from the Danish Childhood Cancer Foundation in 2007, an organization that at the time received all donations from Team Rynkeby. Back then, the childhood cancer laboratory at Rigshospitalet had only four employees. Today, the research department has grown to more than 130 staff members. 

- We’ve been able to build a research environment that retains talented researchers. They stay because they see and trust that funding continues year after year. Every time a new researcher with new expertise joins, it creates new research opportunities as we uncover more things we need to investigate to better understand childhood cancers, he explains.

But building such a large and strong research unit in a small country like Denmark shouldn’t have been possible. That is why a significant portion of the donated funds have gone into developing international research networks and collaborations — efforts that have allowed Schmiegelow and his international colleagues to make groundbreaking discoveries.

- It is remarkable that we’ve succeeded in building a shared understanding that progress requires more than isolated research projects. Today, there is enormous international respect for the research we do in Denmark. Building these collaborations has taken many years. The Danish Childhood Cancer Foundation’s funding has been the single most important factor in making Denmark a global leader in several areas of childhood cancer research, says Kjeld Schmiegelow and adds:

- We should be incredibly proud of that.

The search for meaning — and significantly lower mortality

Back in Helsinki, Laura Paasio is quick to acknowledge that also for Finnish doctors and pediatric oncologists, highly coordinated international collaboration and sharing of knowledge – not least among researchers in the Nordic countries – has been a gamechanger that has helped pave the way for new important findings and improvements.

Every second day, a child in Finland receives a cancer diagnosis.

But thanks to increased research funding and hard work, the survival rate has risen significantly — from 81 percent a decade ago to 86 percent today.

Six out of seven Finnish children survive their cancer today, placing Finland among the best countries in the world when it comes to survival rates.

- It was an enormous relief when we could finally document that the funds AAMU and Team Rynkeby have raised have helped ensure that significantly more children survive. That is the essence of meaningfulness — exactly what I hoped for when we began cooperating with Team Rynkeby.

For the most common form of leukemia, more than 95 percent of children now survive — thanks to individualized and tailored treatments.

- One of the things I am most proud and grateful for is that our research funding has helped pave the way for much more targeted treatment. As one doctor told me: previously, we were shooting scattershot at the cancer cells — today we can hit the cancer with great precision. This has made an enormous difference not only for survival but also for the quality of the adult lives of the patients.

But even though new treatments and knowledge have ensured that more children grow up without severe long-term effects, two out of three Finnish survivors still struggle with side effects from treatment.

- There is still so much to do, and I cannot emphasize enough how crucial it is that the Finnish Childhood Cancer Foundation, AAMU — thanks to Team Rynkeby — can now commit to long-term research projects.

This story is one of 10 gathered to mark Team Rynkeby’s 25th anniversary — stories about people who have helped shape our journey. Those who fight for others. Those who’ve received help. And those we’ve lost along the way.