Boston Man Fundraising to Find Cure for Wife's Rare Cancer

Orphan disease myxoid leiomysarcoma affects fewer than 150 people in the U.S.

ByABC News
July 3, 2013, 1:49 PM
Rick and Erica Kaitz were honored at a recent Red Sox game at Fenway Park in Boston for their efforts to raise funds for cancer research.
Rick and Erica Kaitz were honored at a recent Red Sox game at Fenway Park in Boston for their efforts to raise funds for cancer research.
Courtesy Metrodesign

July 4, 2013— -- For 25 years, Rick and Erica Kaitz were volunteers in the world of cancer research and fundraising, living a good life in Boston with their two daughters and spending five months a year in their second home in Hawaii.

That was until last June, when Erica, 52, was diagnosed with a rare form of uterine cancer -- myxoid leiomysarcoma (LMS). Fewer than 150 patients in the United States have the disease, which is poorly understood and for which research is virtually unfunded.

"Our life was totally altered," said Rick Kaitz, 58 and an attorney. The couple, married for 27 years, have two adult daughters. "We were enjoying life, cutting back on work. The kids were out of the house and we were very much in touch."

Now, Kaitz is on family medical leave and is the main caregiver at home, driving back and forth to the Dana Farber Cancer Institute, and on a quest to find a cure to save his wife.

"I think what drives me is trying to figure out this cancer," he told ABCNews.com.

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Since the early 1990s, the couple has ridden or volunteered with the Pan-Mass Challenge (PMC), which raises money for cancer research and treatment at Dana-Farber through an annual bike-a-thon that crosses the state. For much of that time, Erica Kaitz has been on the PMC's head staff.

In the last three decades, the organization has raised $375 million, more than any other single athletic fundraising event in the country.

And now Rick Kaitz has organized a PMC team of more than 100 runners and cyclists to raise $1.5 million for the foundation he created -- the Erica Kaitz LMS Research NOW Fund at Dana-Farber so that scientists can study these rare sarcomas.

Erica was diagnosed with what her doctors thought was a benign uterine fibroid. A partial hysterectomy revealed that it was an LMS, a cancer with no standard of care for treatment.

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Sarcoma in general occurs in less than 1 percent of the population, said Dr. Suzanne George, medical oncologist at Dana-Farber and Erica Kaitz's doctor.

"LMS is a sub-type of soft-tissue sarcoma," she said. "It can originate in any part of the body, but the uterus is one of the more common locations of this uncommon cancer."

About 85 percent of all women have uterine fibroids, according to George, and the chances of a suspected fibroid being this type of sarcoma are about 1 in 10,000.

"The challenge is that we don't have any way of identifying which ones of those fibroids may later be identified as sarcoma."

Some doctors speculate that new non-invasive techniques for removing fibroids -- more common now than surgery -- can actually unleash these hidden and aggressive sarcomas.

"The challenge is, we need better tools to ID these rare tumors up front to see if we need to change management at the beginning," she said of treatment for common fibroids.

LMS is so rare it is considered an "orphan disease," one that so few patients have, that there is insufficient funding for research and treatment, and pharmaceutical companies have no incentive to create potential drugs because profits will be negligible.

But the Kaitz fundraising will enable the Dana-Farber research team, led by Dr. George Demetri, senior vice president for experimental therapeutics, to learn more in collaboration with other scientists from top universities.

Demetri was instrumental in demonstrating that Gleevec -- one of the first examples of targeted cancer therapies -- was effective in treating gastrointestinal stromal tumor, a form of sarcoma. His work has led to the FDA approval of several other "smart drugs" for cancer.