The Adelaide Silver Style, the fundraiser Letitia Linke started while undergoing treatment for ovarian cancer, will mark its 10th anniversary on Saturday 7 November. The event, now run by the Letitia Linke Research Foundation, has raised more than $500,000 for ovarian cancer research in South Australia.
This year’s Silver Nights event will be held at Top of the Ark at the Arkaba Hotel, with Letitia’s mother, Madelyn Duckmanton, and her sister, Melissa, as hosts.
Letitia was diagnosed in 2014, aged 34. Like most women, she had never heard of ovarian cancer before her diagnosis. There is still no routine screening test, and the symptoms can be hard to recognise. While undergoing surgery, chemotherapy and radiotherapy, she chaired the committee that ran the first Adelaide Silver Style in 2016.
“I know I’m not going to benefit from this,” she told her family. “But someone will.”
Letitia died on 1 August 2018, aged 38, leaving her husband and two young sons. Six weeks later, Madelyn and Melissa ran the event again.
Madelyn has now lost two of the women she loved most to the disease: her sister-in-law Rose, and then Letitia. She established the Foundation to keep a promise to her daughter, which was to keep fighting for other women and families facing ovarian cancer.
“I’m going to do this for Rose and for Letitia,” she says. “Because they can’t.”
Funding research that matters
The Foundation’s monthly giving program funds PhD scholarships in ovarian cancer research. In three and a half years it has grown from supporting one student to four.
For the past four years, the Foundation has also funded research led by Adelaide University Senior Research Fellow Dr Manuela Klinger Hoffmann into more targeted treatments.
“Ideas are nothing without the manpower to make them real,” Dr Klinger Hoffmann says. “The funding from the LLRF has enabled us to advance our research, taking us closer to targeted and personalised treatment for ovarian cancer.”
The Foundation has also helped keep a promising ovarian cancer screening test alive at Adelaide University. Madelyn describes the gap between discovery and the next round of funding as the “valley of death.”
From 2027, the Foundation will also fund a new research project at Flinders University.
“If you don’t find that next step, those ideas can end up going to nothing,” Madelyn says. “We’re not letting this go.”
Event details
When: Saturday 7 November 2026, 6pm–11.30pm
Where: Top of the Ark, Arkaba Hotel
Tickets: $225pp at trybooking.com/DKHRL
Dress: Silver, black tie or “After 5 Glam”
The volunteer-run Letitia Linke Research Foundation is led by Letitia’s family and a community of supporters, many of them personally affected by ovarian cancer. It raises awareness of the disease and funds South Australian research into earlier detection and better treatment.
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