Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center Director Dr. Stephen Nimer leads a team of world-renowned doctors that is helping make South Florida a leading destination for treatment and innovation.
Dr. Stephen Nimer is helping create cutting-edge cancer programs and studies at Miami’s Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center (here pictured at UM/Sylvester).
In most places around the country, cancer patients will tell you what treatment center they visit—in Boston, for instance, they say, “I go to Dana-Farber” or “Massachusetts General”—but in New York City, they call out their doctors by name. For some 20 years, there was no bigger point of pride among New Yorkers battling cancer than being able to say, “I go to Nimer.” That’s Dr. Stephen D. Nimer, one of the world’s most acclaimed hematologists, who treated everyone from Nobel Prize winners to award-winning playwright Susan Sontag and fashion icon Oscar de la Renta during his tenure at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC) in Manhattan.
Now at the helm of the Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center (UM/Sylvester) since 2012, Dr. Nimer has brought his considerable clout, intellect, and drive to the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine, where the noted leukemia and stem cell transplant researcher and clinician is putting the state’s only university-based cancer center on the map. “We’ve increased our philanthropy by 70 to 80 percent since I’ve come here,” says Nimer. On April 25, the center will host its annual fundraiser, the 2015 Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center gala, appropriately titled “Brave,” at the JW Marriott Marquis Miami.
Dr. Nimer is seeing that the funds raised are being put to good use. To date, he’s brought in more than 57 top-tier physicians and scientists from around the world, drawing from the likes of MSKCC, Harvard, Stanford, Johns Hopkins, and other international centers of academic acclaim. For starters, UM/Sylvester built a program in hematologic malignancies, or blood cancers, recruiting a team of more than 10, plus another nine medical physicists, radiation oncologists, and laboratory people for the radiation oncology group. Most recently, says Nimer, “we just brought down a new head of surgical oncology from Vanderbilt; he’s focused on pancreatic cancer.”
Dr. Nimer and oncologist Dr. Pasquale Benedetto (right) in the Cancer Center courtyard.
Thanks to a $3.3 million appropriation from the State of Florida legislature, the center was able to enlist a world leader in the burgeoning field of epigenetics—which studies the ways in which cells maintain their identity. Last year, Sylvester hosted an epigenetics symposium in Miami, attended by experts from 10 different countries around the world. The symposium fostered the sharing of new knowledge, collaboration, and new ways of thinking about cancer—and also netted them a new recruit, a scientist from Barcelona, who just started at Sylvester this March.
Given his experience and stature in his field, Nimer could have gone to any number of prestigious university centers after MSKCC. “I didn’t want to be bound by the traditions of the institution” at a Harvard or Yale, he notes. At UM, the opportunity for sustained innovation was too good to pass up. In the words of University President Donna Shalala, that rang true for Nimer: “She told me she found it messy” down here in Miami when she arrived. Meaning there’s more room to grow and explore and create the kind of institution he wanted. “When I was at Sloan Kettering, we would bring somebody who would have all these ideas, and then three years later they were talking a lot like everyone else at Sloan Kettering, and a lot less like they were talking before they got here. We let people follow their own dreams a little bit longer down here.”
One recent addition he’s enthusiastic about is Dr. Brian Slomovitz, the new director of the Division of Gynecologic Oncology. “He set up the Ovarian Cancer Early Detection Clinic,” Nimer says. “If you look around the country, there’s almost nobody who’s doing early detection in ovarian cancer. It is not that we have something that’s so unique that nobody else could do, but in a year from now we will, because we’re focused on it in a new way.”
With (from left) Pharrell Williams, Ofira Sandberg, and Georgia Nimer at the Gabrielle’s Angel Foundation for Cancer Research Angel Ball in New York in 2013.
In the center’s quest for National Cancer Institute certification, which it hopes to achieve by 2017—which would make it one of only 41 institutions with NCI certification—Nimer has helped create numerous cutting-edge cancer programs and studies in which Sylvester is striving for national impact. “We have an amazing program in viral oncology, which employs viruses to kill cancer. We have one of the world’s best groups of people, including somebody we recently recruited from UCLA and someone from Harvard. And we’re going to have novel programs.”
While his reputation as a leader in his field has helped pave the way for other talent to join him, it doesn’t hurt that he genuinely seems to love the lifestyle of South Florida. Nimer and his wife of 27 years, Georgia, reside by the beach, and he takes hours-long bike rides on weekends, to stay in shape for the 12-hour-plus days and all-nighters that are frequently part of the job. “Miami’s been a great place for us to live, an up-and-coming city with booming reserves to make the best possible cancer center, and I’ve been able to convince a lot of these people to come out to buy into the dream.”
Treating Miami’s elderly residents—a group of the overall population that’s been underserved in general, he notes—was also a compelling reason for his decision to head south. “I was raised in a household where I was taught it was important to give back,” says Nimer, who still sees roughly one new patient a week. Every one of his patients has had his cell phone number ever since he first got one 20 years ago. “Having cancer is hard,” he says. “It’s an honor and a privilege taking care of people in their greatest time of need.” Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center, 1475 NW 12th Ave., Miami, 305-243-5302