For Robert Stuart, his long career of dedication to cancer research was validated with the remarkable survival of one very important patient – his wife. Going to work each day has new meaning, now that he wakes up every morning to a “living miracle.”

“We’re celebrating today her being a survivor. She was very close to death and has recovered fully,” Dr. Stuart says of his wife, Charlene. “It’s a miracle and the miracle began with a clinical trial.”

Charlene Stuart developed leukemia in 2000 while living in Saudi Arabia, where Dr. Stuart was head of the oncology department at a hospital in Riyadh. Chemotherapy and a stem cell transplant at the Saudi Arabia hospital proved to be a short-lived treatment, and Dr. Stuart knew his wife needed another, more specialized transplant or her chances for survival were slim.

The couple returned to the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston, where Dr. Stuart had founded the clinical trials program and the bone marrow transplant unit in the late 1980s. Mrs. Stuart checked into the hospital where she had once served as CEO and became the first person in the state to undergo the new transplant, with her brother’s stem cells, as part of a clinical trial. Four years after her diagnosis, the cancer remains in remission.

Dr. Stuart is a cancer survivor himself – he had surgery to treat kidney cancer in 1991. But his wife’s triumph over leukemia is what has brought the meaning of his work into focus. “Her life-saving therapy would not have been possible 10 years ago,” Dr. Stuart says, and is the result of decades of cancer research. “I have spent my career promoting cancer clinical trials, and when my wife’s life was on the line, a clinical trial saved her.”

Dr. Stuart started cycling in his 30s and it has been an activity that has sustained him through difficult times. He turned to cycling to regain his stamina after his own cancer treatment, and rose early every morning to ride in the desert while his wife was being treated for leukemia in Saudi Arabia.

As he trains and rides across the country on the Bristol-Myers Squibb Tour of Hope™, Dr. Stuart will be wearing a hospital ID bracelet with his wife’s name on it to remind him of his “living miracle.” He also wants to tell people about the need for clinical trials to test the many new cancer treatments being developed. “Cancer research and participation in a clinical trial saved my wife’s life,” he says. “I want our children and their children to have even better opportunities if they ever need cancer treatment.”

Dr. Stuart is a strong cancer advocate and has received numerous awards for his work and fundraising efforts.