Prominent neurosurgeon Charlie Teo laments he is the "lone voice" talking about brain cancer in Australia, in part because the high mortality rate means so few survivors are able to help promote awareness of it.
Professor Teo says brain cancer has a five year survival rate of just 22 per cent and the lack of survivors and advocates is impacting fundraising efforts to help find a cure.
"We have a terrible survival rate. We don't have spokespeople, we don't have advocates," Prof Teo told AAP.
"We don't have advocates who go out and go, 'well I'm a survivor of breast cancer, I'm a survivor of bowel cancer, I'm a survivor of Hodgkin's disease', and now they go and out and beat the drum and sort of raise money.
"We're basically stuck behind the eight ball right from the get go."
Prof Teo says his medical colleagues also appear to be too busy "looking after their own interests" to invest their own time or money in trying to find cures.
"Unfortunately it's me, as a lone voice," he said.
But Prof Teo hoping his new Charlie Teo Foundation, which will help fund brain cancer research, can start to turn things around.
The foundation's launch on Friday came about two months after Prof Teo stepped away from the Cure Brain Cancer Foundation he launched in 2001, saying he wasn't happy with how it was being run, particularly it's overhead costs of about 65 per cent.
His new foundation will aim for overhead costs below 30 per cent so donors get "bang for bucks", he said.
Among the charity's fundraising endeavors is a partnership with the sixth annual Sydney Skinny, a nude swim to be held at Cobblers Beach at Middle Head on Sydney Harbour in March.
Prof Teo will take part in the event for the third time in 2018, saying the discomfort of getting nude is nothing compared to what his patients go through.
"To ask people like you and me who don't have brain cancer to get out of their comfort zone for just one day is not a big ask," he said.
