When , was a kid growing up in Miami in the 1960s he wanted to build a bionic man, like the $6-million dollar one portrayed a decade later by Lee Majors on television, and so he set his sights on a career in engineering.
Now, at age 70, Zinner is leaving Harvard Medical School and Dana-Farber/Brigham and Women's Cancer Center to return to his hometown to help build and staff a new $430-million cancer center that will join the ranks of an emerging class of hybrid academic-community cancer centers.
Zinner has been clinical director of the Farber-Brigham cancer center, surgeon-in-chief at Brigham and Women's Hospital, Moseley professor of surgery at Harvard Medical School, and founder of .
In his new position, he will be the founding chief executive officer and executive medical director of 's newly created (MCI).
For years, Baptist Health -- which has 7 hospitals and about 50 outpatient and urgent-care facilities throughout south Florida -- had offered various oncology services through private providers, but recently began bringing oncologists on staff full-time and started construction of a new facility that is slated to open at the end of 2016.
During the search for its founding CEO, Baptist interviewed 32 candidates from among more than 200 applicants to find the right person to head what it hopes will become a multidisciplinary destination cancer center serving south Florida, the Caribbean, and Latin America.
For an increased technological and marketing edge in the competitive Miami cancer center community, MCI is also constructing a proton beam radiation facility that should be operative in 2017.
Zinner said in a telephone interview with 番茄社区 that he and MCI had been on each other's respective radar for the last several years, but in a very different context, and that over time and with various changing circumstances that relationship had morphed into his becoming a viable candidate for the new post, which he finally accepted in November.
The decision was not an easy one, he said.
"But after 28 years of doing the same job, and with my wife's passing [in 2014], I felt it was time for some new challenges and adventures."
His wife's diagnosis and ultimate death from pancreatic cancer was especially painful and frustrating for Zinner, who is an expert in pancreatic-hepatobiliary diseases and was co-founder and co-director of the gastrointestinal cancer treatment center (with Robert Mayer, MD) at Dana-Farber.
"After seeing Ronny develop an illness that I had been treating for 35 years, I stopped doing Whipples, and couldn't face another pancreatic cancer patient," he said.
Zinner originally served as a Dana-Farber representative when he was introduced to the budding cancer center a few years ago. He was already familiar with the Baptist system, which had successfully treated his mother for carbon monoxide poisoning years before.
Dana-Farber had then been entertaining some type of affiliation with a Miami-area health system, but nothing tangible emerged from the idea at the time.
Now, MCI is about to announce an academic affiliation with one of the "top three cancer centers in the nation or a leading Florida cancer center," according to Baptist Health COO Wayne Brackin, who spoke with 番茄社区 by phone. (The interview was monitored by a Baptist Health public relations representative.)
That relationship will eventually lead to phase II and III clinical trials and investigator-initiated research, said Zinner, who added that the pending affiliation was critical to his decision to join MCI.
Brackin said that in addition to Zinner, MCI has also recently recruited Miguel Villalona, MD, from Ohio State's James Comprehensive Cancer Center, as a deputy director and chief scientific officer, and Jeff Boyd, PhD, from Fox Chase Cancer Center, as chief of translational research and genomics. The addition of a leading radiation oncologist familiar with proton beam therapy will also be announced in the near future.
Zinner plans to start full-time at the Miami center within the next few months and has already been hearing from colleagues around the country who have expressed interest in perhaps joining him. He hopes to recruit medical, surgical, and radiation oncologists who are academic-minded but would like to work in a community setting, and he is determined to create multidisciplinary clinics.
"I'll be doing the equivalent of a environmental assessment for a strategic plan based on the needs of the institution, but I know I will be looking to recruit a stem cell and bone-marrow transplantation team, neurosurgeons for the proton beam surgery unit, and various experts in a number of solid tumors," he said.
Brackin said that Baptist started considering building a cancer center about 5 years ago, when among other things, it realized that its own medical staff, employees, and board members were seeking cancer care at institutions outside the region.
Recognizing there was a need for better cancer care in south Florida, the health system looked at a variety of models, including two of the hybrid academic-community cancer centers featured in 番茄社区 in August: Christiana Care Health System's in Newark, Del., and Carolina's HealthCare System's in Charlotte, N.C.
Baptist wanted to do something on a significant scale in cancer care, according to Brackin, and the Miami Cancer Institute is the result. He said it could someday seek National Cancer Institute designation.
Meanwhile, Zinnner, who had spent his entire career at NCI-designated institutions, wanted the challenge of being involved in creating "a destination cancer center that delivers the highest quality compassionate care for cancer patients and their families using cancer care and genomics."
The fact that he was raised in Miami before pursuing an undergraduate degree in electrical engineering at Johns Hopkins was also an attraction.
Zinner said that following graduation he had to decide whether he wanted to apply to medical school or build missile guidance systems for Westinghouse in Baltimore.
He had always been interested in science, and at age 16 won a regional science fair that earned him a free trip to Europe, and was a Westinghouse Science Fair finalist.
"I was thinking of becoming a biomedical engineer and building people, and got involved in a number of science projects, but decided to apply to the University of Florida College of Medicine my senior year at Hopkins," he said, noting it was a great honor for him to be the 2014 commencement speaker at Hopkins' School of Engineering's graduation ceremonies.
Zinner said that both engineering and surgery deal with problem solving, planning, and analytics, and he liked that surgeons "don't get incapacitated by indecision."
He returned to Hopkins for his surgical residency and eventually became vice chair of the medical center's surgery department and co-chair of its gastrointestinal service, before moving to Los Angeles as chair of surgery at UCLA.
When he relocated to Boston to assume his positions at Harvard, the Brigham, and Dana-Farber in 1994, he experienced firsthand the transition brought on by the formation of .
From 2008 to 2010, he served as chair of the American College of Surgeons' Board of Governors, and is currently vice chair of the College's Board of Regents and chair of its Health Policy and Advocacy Committee. He is also a member of the editorial boards of Annals of Surgery, Journal of Gastrointestinal Surgery, and the Journal of the American College of Surgeons.