Student Spotlight

Surgeon J. David Pitcher and one of his young patients, Lazaro Cordero, arrive at the Dolphins Cycling Challenge finish line.

A Wheel
Good Cause

Dolphins Cycling Challenge
spins gold out of asphalt to help cure cancer.

By Robert C. Jones Jr.
Photo by David Sutta

At mile 26, J. David Pitcher Jr.’s 6-foot 3-inch frame ached beyond description. The Miller School of Medicine orthopaedic surgeon had completed four marathons in 2012, but the metaphorical expression, “hitting the wall”—used by most endurance athletes to describe the point at which glycogen stores in the liver and muscles are depleted, ushering in fatigue and energy loss—didn’t even come close to describing what he felt on this early-November Sunday as he neared the end of a 30-mile bike ride. Despite the pain, Pitcher pressed on, downing three bottles of water and a Gatorade to replenish his energy stores. With two miles to go, he picked up the pace and soon entered the 75,000-seat Sun Life Stadium in Miami Gardens—his destination—to the applause of hundreds. Of those who crossed the finish line at the end of the 2012 Dolphins Cycling Challenge, Pitcher stood out. He’d pedaled his recumbent bicycle from Fort Lauderdale to Miami while towing in a custom buggy all 165 pounds of his 17-year-old patient Lazaro Cordero, who lost his left leg to bone cancer.“A chauffeur is never more important than his passenger,” Pitcher told Cordero at one point during their trek.

Outfitted in cycling jerseys, the duo joined nearly 1,500 others who rode to raise funds for lifesaving research and treatment programs for the school’s Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center. The 2012 fundraising total of $2.2 million is believed to be the largest single-event donation made by any NFL team and one of the biggest in Sylvester’s history.

“From the survivors who participated to those who rode for loved ones, it was a big success in supporting cancer research at Sylvester,” says Miller School Dean Pascal J. Goldschmidt, who rode through three South Florida counties to complete the DCC’s full 170-mile route. “It’s this commitment that propels our work to save more lives.”

Former Miami Dolphins tight end Jim “Mad Dog” Mandich helped start the fundraiser three years ago while he was battling bile duct cancer, a disease that took his life in April 2011 at the age of 62.

Ridership has more than doubled each year since the launch.

The third annual ride began on Saturday, November 3, 2012, with cyclists setting out from Sun Life in the cool air of an early-morning darkness that eventually gave way to clear skies and warm temperatures. Some completed a 30-mile journey to Miami Beach; others, like Goldschmidt, cycled on to West Palm Beach, where they stayed overnight before riding back to Miami.

Day two’s climactic conclusion resembled the Champs-Élysées finish at the Tour de France, with a multitude of cyclists entering Sun Life Stadium along a path lined with cheering spectators, a jumbo screen displaying each arrival.

Members of the TriCanes, a UM club that competes in triathlons, were among the first finishers, completing the West Palm Beach-to-Miami journey at a brisk 20-mile-per-hour pace. Each rode for a family member or friend who had either passed away from or is undergoing treatment for cancer.

John Labriola, 22, a meteorology and math major from New Jersey, rode for his aunt Jennifer, who died from complications of cancer last August. Engineering major Maggie Ricciuti, 19, was thinking of the aunt whose ovarian cancer is now one year in remission. Finance major Monte Eiseman, 20, rode for his grandparents, both of whom died of the disease.

Luis Cardona, 23, rode for his late grandfather Pacho, who had prostate cancer, and for his uncle Jesus, who is undergoing treatment for brain cancer.

“Cancer runs in my family, so riding in the challenge was important to me,” says Cardona, an industrial engineering and economics major who graduates in May but plans to return for the 2013 challenge.

For the second year in a row, the Sunday finale at Sun Life Stadium was held in conjunction with Sylvester’s Cancer Survivors Day, a gathering of people from all walks of life who have defeated cancer with the help of Sylvester physicians. Among them, sitting with her husband, was Joan Scheiner, chair of Sylvester’s Board of Governors and a 16-year survivor of leiomyosarcoma, a rare cancer of the soft tissue. “I felt like my world had stopped and was spinning out of control,” says the 61-year-old, recounting the day she received her diagnosis. “But from the very beginning, I knew that I was going to make it if I found the right doctors.”

The Miller School’s Pasquale Benedetto, professor of medicine, became her oncologist. “I put my trust and faith in him,” Scheiner says. After undergoing chemotherapy and enduring several surgeries, she is cancer-free.

“Our partnership with the Dolphins has created not only funds but also enormous awareness of the world-class cancer center we have right here in Miami,” Scheiner adds. “And when you’re sick, there’s no place like home.”

With the first riders rolling in, she walked toward the stadium tunnel, as she has every year, to welcome them. “I never thought I’d see my kids grow to be men,” says Scheiner, who has two sons and two granddaughters. “In most other places, just being a doctor would be enough. But at Sylvester, their commitment runs deep. It’s a true partnership.”

Breast cancer survivor Annie Anderson, a kindergarten teacher for Miami-Dade Public Schools, and her daughters, Adrienne and Rashauna, also watched the riders enter the stadium. “We wanted to celebrate our mom’s recovery in hopes that someday there’ll be a cure,” says Adrienne.

“Someday” may be closer than she and others would believe. DCC funds will give a boost to research that has already resulted in significant findings. Last year a team of Sylvester breast cancer experts participating in a multicenter study of breast tumors discovered the existence of four main breast cancer classes—a discovery that could lead to more targeted therapies.

In other recent studies, a research team that included Sylvester’s new director, Stephen D. Nimer, identified a gene responsible for a subtype of childhood leukemia and found that the signaling protein Akt, implicated in a number of human cancers, can also impair the growth of blood-forming stem cells that develop into cancers like leukemia.

Recruited last year from Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, Nimer was among those who rode in the DCC to benefit Sylvester, which has set “an aggressive agenda that,” Nimer explains, “will allow us to develop and expand our clinical programs and recruit more outstanding physicians and scientists devoted to research.”

“We’ve been very fortunate over the years to have great support from the Sylvester family,” he adds. “The Pap Corps is a big group of supporters who work tirelessly to raise money for us, and we’re fortunate that we now have the Dolphins Cycling Challenge as well.”

For surgeon Pitcher, the challenge is a way to bear his young patient’s burden. As a 10-year-old boy in Cuba, Cordero was diagnosed with osteosarcoma, the most common malignant bone tumor in kids. Surgeons operated, but he lost so much muscle in his left leg that he needed crutches to walk. By the time Cordero came under Pitcher’s care after arriving in the U.S. years later, the leg had to be amputated.

“Osteosarcoma has an overall survivorship of about 65 percent, and only 20 percent without chemotherapy,” Pitcher notes. “Each person who survives it has a rare story. Each health care provider involved in their story is forever changed. It’s as simple as that. I’m changed by my patients. If I could take their place, I would—I see that sentiment in the eyes and hearts of their fathers, mothers, brothers, and sisters too. And it has rubbed off onto me. If it rubs off onto another from me, bless the Lord for that. It’s what we’ve trained for and been created for.”

Today Cordero, a student at South Dade High School, is cancer free. As he and Pitcher biked from Fort Lauderdale to Miami, they discussed the path—from diagnosis and sadness to treatment and renewed hope—that brought them to this point.

“We talked about the kids in Cuba with his kind of tumor who didn’t make it, and how he wished they could be part of the race and the excitement,” Pitcher recounts. “We talked about how God had given him another chance and what he was going to do with that chance. We talked about his parents and the sacrifices they made for him. We talked as brothers, as father and son, as friends on the same journey.”

The idea to ride in the DCC while pulling one of his patients came weeks before the event, somewhere near the Mason-Dixon line. As Pitcher pedaled his recumbent from Maryland into Pennsylvania, he towed his wife, Pam, who’d been injured while training for their planned tour of the Great Allegheny Passage Trail.

“Person after person commented on what a great thing we were doing,” Pitcher recalls. “Pam kept saying she’d rather be pedaling, but eventually she realized that it’s a great opportunity to bear another’s burdens. It was then that we thought perhaps we could turn something bad into something good.”

Pitcher and Cordero just made the DCC entry deadline.

“It was a long, tough ride,” says Cordero, “but Dr. Pitcher made it easy, telling a lot of jokes to keep up my spirits.”

Nimer, the Sylvester director, says each cancer patient is unique. “We have to understand the patient’s individual cancer, and then we have to understand the impact on the patient. Some of this involves the highest technology—proteomics, genomics—and the other part involves the simplest technology, which is listening to the patient.”

Pitcher describes his patient as “a young man with a bright future and all the world ahead of him.”
Cordero agrees. With his new prosthetic leg, received after the DCC, he plans to return for the 2013 event—this time riding his own bicycle.