My daughters Kelly and Anna, my son Thomas and I ride to support Dmitri Itzkovitz and The Dmitri Itzkovitz Pediatric Brain Tumor Research Fund and Jake Vincent, an 12 year-old Dana Farber patient who commutes with his family from Tennessee for his cancer treatments. I'm also riding in honor of my mom who lost her battle with breast cancer in 2019, Alfred Pace, who lost his courageous fight against gastric cancer last year, David Serrette, who passed away from Liver Cancer also last year and Francisco Pena, the father of one of our PMC teammates, Wilfredo Pena, who passed away from stomach cancer in 2021. Too many names….

I don’t have to tell you how important cancer research is and how critical Dana Farber's Jimmy Fund is to that research. BUT, something AMAZING happened as a result of our team's fundraising efforts. The lab we help fund, a research lab that literally wouldn’t exist without all of your help, found a drug from Takeda Pharmaceuticals that might help with Dmitri’s type of cancer. They tested it with your funding funding before putting it into humans. In February of 2018, the folks at Dana Farber tried it on their very first patient: 9-year-old Nathan, one of our PMC pedal partners, whose tumor had begun to grow (as these tumors usually do), and it SHRUNK THE TUMOR. Nathan went from having to limp with weakness developing in his arms to skiing and playing catch again. When we got the note of this success from Dmitri’s father it made us all so happy, but it also made us realize the REAL IMPACT your funding can have on this research. This drug will be filing for FDA approval next year so it will be able to help many pediatric brain cancer patients with a certain type of disease.

And earlier this year Dana Farber helped one of our Year Up teammates, Kate Chertavian, treat her early stage breast cancer and, hopefully, cure her disease.

There is so much more to do, and many more discoveries like this one to be made for a cure, so please celebrate this step forward by supporting us this year through Thomas, Kelly and Anna's donation pages. Thanks!