Orlando hotel magnate Harris Rosen is donating $12 million to a massive University of Florida-led research collaboration “to rewrite the story of brain cancer” after losing his youngest son, Adam, to the disease last November.
The announcement, made Friday evening, came as more than 100 researchers from the United States, Canada and Europe gathered at Rosen’ s Shingle Creek Hotel in Orlando for an inaugural summit of the newly launched ReMission Alliance Against Brain Tumors, which UF officials called an “unprecedented” global collaboration to develop better weaponry against a complex and often deadly aggressor.
“Adam was an incredible athlete — the most physically fit of four youngsters in a family where all of us were involved in some athletic endeavor,” said Rosen, a dedicated swimmer. “He never gave up. He fought this to the bitter end, and I think he would be incredibly proud to have his name associated with what one day we hope and pray will be a cure for that horrible, horrible, horrible disease.”
Adam Michael Rosen died at age 26 after a 2 1/2-year battle with anaplastic astrocytoma, a rare, malignant brain tumor.
Although brain cancer can strike at any age, it is a particular threat to very young children and adults in later life. Last year, it claimed the lives of nearly 17,000 Americans, including U.S. Sen. John McCain, who died in August.
Rosen — founder, president and chief operating officer of Rosen Hotels & Resorts — is giving $10 million from his foundation over the next decade and another $2 million from family friend and entrepreneur Craig Mateer, founder of Orlando baggage-handling company Bags Inc. The money is part of a $100 million fundraising target set by UF, which is leading the multi-institutional research collaborative focused on the advancement of novel immunotherapies for adult and pediatric brain cancer.
“To treat these aggressive brain tumors effectively is going to take a multi-disciplinary, multi-pronged approach, and no one center, no one investigator, has all of the resources and all the insights,” said Dr. Duane Mitchell, co-director of the university’s brain tumor center and director of its brain tumor immunotherapy research program. “What we’re doing is taking centers of excellence and investigators with world-renowned expertise — each with its particular insight in tackling this problem — and the aim is to really pool that intellect so that the total is much greater than the sum of its parts.”
Already, harnessing the body’s immune system to battle brain tumors has shown great promise, Mitchell said, leading in some cases to “what I would call long-term survivors, but by any definition might be called cured.” The challenge, he said, is finding a strategy to replicate success from one patient to another.
“We are learning that almost each patient has a unique disease in terms of the types of changes that have occurred,” he said. “So even people with the same diagnosis, such as glioblastoma – their tumors may look very similar under a microscope, but we know that the underlying biology and genetic changes vary significantly from patient to patient.”
Rosen met Mitchell during the course of his son’s treatment at UF Health Shands Hospital.
“We really thought the people at Shands did everything they possibly could do, and we wanted to demonstrate our appreciation,” Rosen said. “Adam’s life expectancy was initially less than a year, but he was with us for two and a half years.”
Adam Michael Rosen’s name will grace the facility that houses the UF Health Neuromedicine practice at and the neuro-oncology laboratories within the university’s brain institute.
But the money raised will not only support work at UF; it will also go to other institutes partnering with UF in what the university calls “an elite research community” of experts in neuro-oncology, tumor immunology, genetics, artificial intelligence, neuroimaging and bioinformatics.
In a sector where competition for research dollars is often fierce, Rosen said, the notion of sharing intrigued him.
“Instead of each university or each lab or each hospital working frantically to be the first out of the box, they decided to work together,” he said. “That’s really what got my interest.”
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