The fourth Fight For A Cure martial arts tournament, which raises money for cancer research, has taken place at Nuanu.
Forty fighters — amateurs and professionals from various countries — represented more than thirty gyms from all over Bali, and around one and a half thousand spectators watched the bouts.
The fights were held on Saturday, 3 October, at the Block 42 venue. The bouts started at four in the afternoon and ran one after another into the evening, with each fighter's details — age, height and number of fights — shown on screen before every match. Spectators sat in the stands and at tables right by the ring, with bars and a kitchen operating nearby; their takings also went into the fundraising total.
Nuanu's social fund raised its own contribution to almost 117 million rupiah — a year earlier it gave 45 million. Over four years in total, Germ Cell, the foundation behind the tournament, has donated around 1.5 billion rupiah to cancer research.
The money goes to the Chris O'Brien Lifehouse cancer centre in Sydney and to two studies being carried out there. Kim Alexander, who leads the brain cancer programme, is looking into whether a routine blood test can reveal that glioblastoma — the most aggressive brain tumour — has come back. The team of Professor Jeremy Crook is working on electrochemotherapy, in which electrical pulses boost the effect of a chemotherapy drug on the same tumour.
Germ Cell was founded in 2022 by Balinese native Kai Suteja, who has been treated for cancer twice himself. “Whether you won or lost, the real victory is the money raised for research. Better science means better outcomes,” he said at the tournament.
The fighters have personal reasons to step into the ring as well. Anatoli, a fighter from Lions MMA, lost his aunt to blood cancer when he was still a child — that was a big part of why he took up boxing, and this year he fought in her memory. Jake from The Block gym dedicated his bout to his parents, both of whom have had cancer.
Germ Cell does not have a donation page: the foundation raised the money at the tournament itself — from tickets and the bar — while sponsors covered the cost of staging the event. Anyone who wants to help now is invited by the organisers to write to kai@germcell.org or contact the foundation on Instagram: they need sponsors, volunteers and places where they can put up a poster. The date of the next tournament has not been announced yet.
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