$6 million gift to build institute

BY JIM SHAMP : The Herald-Sun
jshamp@heraldsun.com
Jun 5, 2003 : 10:54 pm ET

DURHAM -- A $6 million fund raised by thousands of motorcycle riders has kick-started a children’s brain cancer research institute at Duke University Medical Center.

The new institute, announced Thursday, culminates two decades of development by Mike and Dianne Traynor, an Asheville couple who turned their motorcycling hobby into anti-cancer careers.

The Traynors’ not-for-profit Pediatric Brain Tumor Foundation has allowed them to travel in tandem with benevolent bikers in "Ride for Kids" events throughout the United States while drawing salaries and helping sick children.

The Pediatric Brain Tumor Foundation Institute is to be part of Duke’s Comprehensive Cancer Center, in the Medical Sciences Research Building off Erwin Road. The institute, encompassing research facilities on the building’s first floor, is to develop innovative and less-invasive treatments for children diagnosed with brain tumors.

The $6 million, to come in payments of $1 million per year, is the largest chunk ever bitten off by the foundation, and the largest foundation award ever for the world-renowned Duke cancer center that usually relies on the National Institutes of Health for its research dollars. Darell Bigner, deputy director of the Duke cancer center, will direct the new institute.

On Thursday the Traynors came to Duke to celebrate the award with Bigner and with this year’s "poster boy" for the foundation, 4-year-old self-professed fireman-in-training Ethan Gumabay.

As Ethan moved miniature fire trucks around a conference room table, his bald head was the only hint that he’s taking hits from radiation and powerful anti-cancer drugs to fight a brain tumor.

Brain tumors are the most deadly of childhood cancers. About six of every 10 affected children survive at least five years from the time of diagnosis. But that hasn’t improved much in the past 25 years, and even those who survive often have brain damage and other health problems from the toxic therapies in the limited arsenal available to clinicians.

Bigner said the foundation money should enable Duke scientists to expand research on such projects as gathering human cancer cell lines from around the world, permitting them to seek DNA and RNA triggers for brain tumors. "This will spin off additional efforts we’ll be able to take to NIH," he said.

Ethan isn’t a Duke patient. His mother, Kim Gumabay, said the first doctors they consulted at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore and the National Children’s Medical Center in Washington, D.C., advised her and her husband to have Ethan treated near their Northern Virginia home after he was diagnosed a year ago this week.

But Gumabay said Ethan’s illness has given her family a deep appreciation for the foundation and the potential value of the new Duke research institute.

It was May 3, 2002, when Ethan began getting sick at preschool. It was a Friday afternoon, and Gumabay said she got a call at her job as an information technology consultant that Ethan was vomiting and couldn’t lift his head.

"I asked them to call the paramedics," she said. "The day before, Ethan had hit his head on the playground, and we thought maybe something happened from that." Ethan was taken to the hospital’s head trauma center, where an MRI scan the next day identified his brain tumor.

"My brother Kevin started calling his [motorcycle] rider friends for information," Gumabay said. "They finally called Dianne [Traynor], gave her our address, and she sent us some brochures and other foundation help."

"We get calls like this every day," said Mike Traynor. He noted that 86 percent of the $20 million raised by the foundation has gone into the group’s anti-cancer programming, which is including an expanding Web presence that’s giving the group a global reach.

He said he hopes the foundation, which had given some $250,000 to Duke before the institute award, will be able to establish at least two similar institutes elsewhere in the United States to promote collaborative research.