Dr. Stephen Nimer, one of the world’s premier leukemia and stem cell transplant researchers, will lead the University of Miami’s Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center.
Medical breakthroughs discovered in the laboratory can take a long time to be positioned into follow within the exam room, frequently as a result of there is little communique among analysis scientists and medical physicians.
Dr. Stephen D. Nimer, a renowned researcher and physician named Wednesday as director of the University of Miami’s Sylvester Cancer Center, is vowing to bring equal emphasis to leading-edge scientific research and quality patient care. His goal: to make Miami a worldwide destination for cancer treatment.
“I am going to devote my energies toward bringing the center to the next level,’’ said Nimer, 57, who has pioneered novel therapies for cancer and advocated for more compassionate care of patients. “I want to build on the greatness that exists here.’’
Nimer’s appointment comes just about 18 months after the Sylvester middle’s board launched an international search for a new director to succeed Dr. W. Jarrard Goodwin, who stepped down after 14 years at the helm to turn out to be chief medical officer for the middle.
Joan Scheiner, board chair of the Sylvester Center, said Nimer is the perfect candidate to lead the 20-year-old center into the next stage.
“He’s going to help us build the kind of cancer center we deserve,’’ said Scheiner, who beat metastatic soft tissue sarcoma with the help of Sylvester Center doctors in the late 1990s. “It validates our past and ensures a future with no limits.”
A key member of one of the nation’s leading cancer centers — Memorial Sloan-Kettering in New York — Nimer is considered one of the world’s premier leukemia and stem cell transplant researchers and physicians.
During just about two decades at Sloan-Kettering, Nimer dependent an inpatient application for sufferers with blood disorders, and a blood stem cellphone transplant program for adults with malignant blood diseases, focusing primarily on patients with non-Hodgkin and Hodgkin lymphoma, or multiple myeloma, a cancer of the plasma mobile phones in the bone marrow.
Among Nimer’s notable achievements in the laboratory: developing a bone marrow transplant treatment using stem cells to eliminate cancer cells from the blood and coaxing tumor-reducing proteins out of stem cells, then using those proteins to help enhance the effects of chemotherapy and radiotherapy for cancer patients.
A prolific researcher who has authored more than two hundred clinical publications in a large number of medical journals, Nimer also has made necessary discoveries within the field of pre-most cancersous oncogenes, which can mutate and cause cancer.
Dr. Pascal J. Goldschmidt, dean of UM’s Miller School of Medicine, said Nimer’s scientific discoveries in this area have been nothing short of “remarkable.”
“Dr. Nimer has been a pioneer and an expert in identifying these oncogenes that are specifically relevant to leukemia,” Goldschmidt said, “and he has helped in the development of new drugs and therapeutic strategies to fight the effect of these oncogenes.”
At Sylvester Center, Nimer said, he hopes to build a team of scientists and physicians who will study cancer at the molecular level with the aim of developing more novel therapies through clinical trials and, ultimately, application.
“The goal of a cancer center,’’ he said, “is to try to bring together the people who are studying the biology that underlies cancer.”
Nimer, who will begin work might 1, mentioned he plans to enhance and make bigger services including techniques for breast cancer, lung cancer, prostate most cancers and malignant blood sicknesses. He additionally plans to recruit more than 30 new scientists and physicians, together with professionals in spaces comparable to bone marrow transplantation in addition to further surgeons skilled in curative and restorative strategies, equivalent to breast reconstruction.
Nimer emphasized the importance of applying a similar, multi-disciplinary approach to patient care.
“I handle patients the best way I wish to be looked after,’?? he said, explaining that he would love every patient to obtain a analysis and preliminary treatment plan from a staff of physicians including pathologists, radiologists and surgeons.
And he wants to ensure that every patient receives treatment in a caring environment.
“I’m going to pay a lot of attention to the facilities,’’ he said, “because I think they should be nurturing. … It’s bad enough to have a diagnosis of cancer.”
Goldschmidt stated UM expects Nimer will lead Sylvester so much in the same method he has led at Sloan-Kettering, the place he’s the Alfred P. Sloan Chair in most cancers research and has led the center’s department of hematologic oncology for 12 years.
“We have a very strong cancer center at Sylvester,’’ Goldschmidt said. “But with Dr. Nimer, the goal is to make it the best — not only in South Florida, but also in the United States.’’