Oughton, of Spotsylvania, Va., rides for his daughter, Grace, 3. He cannot believe what she's already endured since she was diagnosed early last year: a dozen chemotherapy courses, two abdominal surgeries, two relapses, a couple of stem cell transplants, more than 20 radiation sessions — not counting the five times they tried total body radiation — and two cycles of antibody treatment.

Sims, of Tampa, Fla., doesn't even try any more to count treatments that his daughter, Sydney, 11, has undergone. When he ran out of fingers and toes to count on, he said, he stopped.

The most promising therapy right now, 3F8 monoclonal antibody therapy, is a two-year course of injections that use a mouse antibody that attaches to the cancer cells, which are then attacked by the immune system. It's excruciating for a few minutes each treatment, because it also attaches to the nerve cells, and they're attacked, too. Most of the children have to be knocked out for the treatment.

And it has another downside. People have human anti-mouse-antibodies (HAMA) that waken and bind up the mouse antibodies so they eventually stop working. That process has to die down between treatments with 3F8. Eventually, the treatments become totally ineffective.

The treatment that's so promising — and out of reach if they can't come up with funding, since pharmaceutical companies can't make much money on a drug that would treat so few children and don't want to manufacture it — is a humanized version of 3F8, which means HAMA would not attack. That's their best hope, they've been told.

The men are determined not to watch children die because of money or its lack. So they pedal, pausing to talk to anyone who will listen. "Do you know anyone who has a couple of million lying around?" one asked facetiously.

Information on the ride, the children and the way to donate are online at www.loneliestroad.org.

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E-mail: lois@desnews.com