Mandi, Reid, Michelle, and Melissa organize Reason to Run.
They have organized every event since the first one. What the run raises goes to the Rhode Island Hospital Foundation, aimed at Dr. Eric T. Wong's neuro-oncology work at Rhode Island Hospital.
Married to Chief Joseph P. Razza, Johnston's Chief of Police, for twenty years. The course follows the route he ran through town every day — which is why it's about 4 miles, roughly a mile longer than a standard 5K.
Chief Razza's story →Married to Robert Stuart Shein, a US Army veteran, linguistics instructor at RIC, and master of five languages. They laughed together for 26 years, with two amazing daughters and lots of adventure.
Rob Shein's story →Married to Dr. Alexander P. Robertson, an orthopedic spine surgeon who spent two decades at University Orthopedics and taught at Brown's Warren Alpert Medical School.
Dr. Robertson's story →Sister to Robert Shein.
“My big brother and protector, who would always root for the underdog. A fighter to the end, he fought cancer with the same determination that he had shown toward all adversaries, with courage and bravery.”
Rob Shein's story →
The doctor whose care the founders wanted the money to reach.
Several of the families behind this event came to know him through their own treatment. When the standard protocol stopped working, he was often the one willing to try an approach built on basic science instead. That is why the founders chose to point the fundraising at his work.
Money raised by Reason to Run is directed toward that kind of work: early, unproven research that established grants rarely cover.
A major focus of Dr. Wong's research is Tumor Treating Fields, a treatment that fights glioblastoma with low-intensity electric fields rather than with drugs or radiation.
A tumor grows because its cells keep splitting in two. To split, a cell has to pull its contents apart into two new cells. Tumor Treating Fields alternate back and forth 200,000 times a second, and they interfere with the parts of the cell that do that pulling. The cell fails to divide properly and dies. There are also signs that this damage may help the immune system recognize the tumor.
Patients wear four adhesive pads on a shaved scalp, wired to the device that produces the fields, for at least 18 hours a day. The pads are changed every three to four days. Wearing it consistently matters: in one trial, patients who wore it at least 18 hours a day lived longer than those who wore it less.
The FDA approved it for glioblastoma that has come back in 2011, and for newly diagnosed glioblastoma in 2015. That made it a fourth kind of treatment, alongside surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy. In the large trial behind the 2015 approval, patients who added it to standard chemotherapy lived a median of 20.9 months, compared with 16.0 months on chemotherapy alone.
The hard part is aiming it. Electric fields don't travel through the head in a simple, predictable path the way a radiation beam does. They spread differently through each kind of tissue, and fluid changes where they go most of all: the fluid around the brain, swelling around a tumor, and the fluid-filled center of some tumors can each make the field at the tumor stronger or weaker. Dr. Wong's group builds 3D computer models from each patient's own scans to show where the fields will actually be strongest. That guides where the pads are placed, so the strongest field reaches the tumor.
The therapy is now also being tested in lung, ovarian, and pancreatic cancers, and his group has modeled how the fields move through the chest and pelvis as well.
Read more
The four of them run it. Everyone who registers or gives keeps it funded.
Register to run or walk →
