"I've been three times [to Canberra] for the government's roundtable and each time I think they don't want me to come back. I'm always the loud person saying, 'I don't understand why we aren't doing more?'" Mr Kawaguchi said, in his American drawl.

Previously the head of oil and gas at ANZ bank and a global head at HSBC, Mr Kawaguchi took over as chief executive of Cure Brain Cancer Foundation early last year.

He gave up his lucrative career to fulfil the dying wish of his mother, who died of cancer in 2016 and wanted him to "give back to the world".

Now based in Sydney, Mr Kawaguchi is applying a private sector approach to the charity, wanting to shake it up, get results faster and inject a sense of urgency.

"I researched so many not-for-profits and the more I researched, the more I found they don't move very fast and I was shocked. Because the people you're serving, in this case brain cancer, they don't have the luxury of time," he said.

He has questioned why more KPIs (key performance indicators) are not applied to the charity sector to ensure the funding and donations are making a difference. "What's the value of a strategy if you don't have milestones to hit?" he said.

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Brain cancer survival rates in Australia have hardly budged for decades. Just two in 10 people survive five years past diagnosis, the same as it was in the mid-1980s.

The Cure Brain Cancer Foundation has set the ambitious target of increasing the brain cancer survival rate five years after diagnosis from 20 per cent to 50 per cent.

Mr Kawaguchi, a father-of-two who has lived all over the world with his previous work, says he and his family are committed to Australia and here for the long haul to see that goal achieved.

"We're all in," he said. "For me, it's not done, until it's done. And done for me means improving the survival rate. I mean, a 22 per cent survival rate for brain cancer over the last 30 years and that has not changed? I mean, that's odd."

Mr Kawaguchi said the foundation had distributed $11 million in the last eight months which was "equivalent to the last 10 years combined". That includes $8 million to bring to Australia GBM AGILE, a clinical trial for patients with the highly-aggressive brain cancer glioblastoma (GBM) designed to rapidly evaluate new therapies.

"It's going to give brain cancer patients opportunities to access trials that they would never be able to access because it's too expensive and also it's only in the US," Mr Kawaguchi said.

"There hasn't been any new treatments for brain cancer in 25, 30 years so it is significant to have five of them coming to the shores of Australia within the next several months."

Mr Kawaguchi said the first trial would be open to 150 patients later this year.

"Every year, on average, 983 Australians are diagnosed with GBM and, again, if 150 are on the trial, that's a relatively large percentage," he said.

Part of his work has been lobbying the US provider of the trial and establishing a presence overseas so countries are more willing to collaborate and share information in the fight against cancer.

"I don't think cancer is an Australian or US issue, I think it's a global issue," he said.

"The biggest frustration is that I don't see much collaboration between the different countries."

The one thing Mr Kawaguchi won't do is 'keep on promising something that never ever happens'.

"My ultimate goal is to give hope," he said.

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