Radiation study may help extend survival rates  

The research breakthroughs you make possible at City of Hope will improve the lives of cancer patients everywhere.

When cancerous tumors develop in the pancreas, a patient’s prognosis is generally not good: The survival rate of pancreatic cancer patients five years after the diagnosis is less than one in four.

Your partnership with City of Hope is continuing to roll back the frontiers of science, even on the most rare and mysterious forms of cancer.

One of the latest examples of this is the work being done by researchers investigating Merkel cell carcinoma (MCC). Only about 1,200 cases of this form of skin cancer are reported in the United States every year, but it is difficult to treat and highly malignant. Even after surgery to remove an MCC tumor and the surrounding lymph nodes, the disease reappears in 50 to 79 percent of patients.

Pablo Mojica-Manosa, M.D., and Joshua D. I. Ellenhorn, M.D., both of City of Hope's department of surgery, and biostatistician David Smith, Ph.D., of the Department of Information Sciences, investigated more than 1,600 cases of MCC to measure the effect of radiation following surgery. They uncovered clear evidence that radiation treatment can extend the survival time of MCC patients well beyond that of patients who didn't receive radiation.

While most MCC patients at City of Hope already receive this radiation treatment, less than half of MCC patients nationwide do. "Many physicians just don't know how to treat MCC," Dr. Ellenhorn says. He hopes this study will encourage more caregivers to consider using radiation as a tool to treat MCC. 

When City of Hope researchers make important discoveries, they don't keep it to themselves. The findings made by Dr. Mojica-Manosa, Dr. Ellenhorn and Dr. Smith were reported in The Journal of Clinical Oncology and read by doctors and researchers across America and around the world. That shows that when you support City of Hope, you're helping make breakthroughs that will improve the lives of cancer patients around the world.