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Writer's pictureTom Walsh

MSK Cancer Breakthrough

Quote from MSK / Fred’s Team about Rectal Breakthrough…


The remarkable results of a clinical trial for rectal cancer are built on decades of innovative research at MSK — work you and your Team Mark members have helped make possible through your participation in Fred’s Team which has supported the efforts of Dr. Cercek and Dr. Diaz.



From MSK website June 5, 2022…


Rectal Cancer Disappears After Experimental Use of Immunotherapy


Sascha Roth remembers the phone call came on a hectic Friday evening.


She was racing around her home in Washington, D.C., to pack for New York, where she was scheduled to undergo weeks of radiation therapy for rectal cancer.


But the phone call from Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSK) medical oncologist Andrea Cercek changed everything, leaving Sascha “stunned and ecstatic — I was so happy.”


Dr. Cercek told Sascha, then 38, that her latest tests showed no evidence of cancer, after Sascha had undergone six months of treatment as the first patient in a clinical trial involving immunotherapy at MSK.


Immunotherapy harnesses the body’s own immune system as an ally against cancer. The MSK clinical trial was investigating — for the first time ever — if immunotherapy alone could beat rectal cancer that had not spread to other tissues, in a subset of patients whose tumor contain a specific genetic mutation.


“Dr. Cercek told me a team of doctors examined my tests,” recalls Sascha. “And since they couldn’t find any signs of cancer, Dr. Cercek said there was no reason to make me endure radiation therapy.”


100% Remission of Rectal Cancer

These same remarkable results would be repeated for all 14 people — and counting — in the MSK clinical trial for rectal cancer with a particular mutation. While it’s a small trial so far, the results are so impressive they were published in The New England Journal of Medicine and featured at the nation’s largest gathering of clinical oncologists in June 2022.


In every case, the rectal cancer disappeared after immunotherapy — without the need for the standard treatments of radiation, surgery, or chemotherapy — and the cancer has not returned in any of the patients, who have been cancer-free for up to two years.


“It’s incredibly rewarding,” says Dr. Cercek, “to get these happy tears and happy emails from the patients in this study who finish treatment and realize, ‘Oh my God, I get to keep all my normal body functions that I feared I might lose to radiation or surgery.’ ”


It's incredibly rewarding to get these happy tears and happy emails from the patients in this study who finish treatment and realize, 'Oh my God, I get to keep all my normal body functions that I feared I might lose to radiation or surgery.'


Her co-investigator, MSK medical oncologist Luis Diaz, Jr., is equally thrilled. He’s spent his career studying how to defeat cancer with immunotherapy. “It’s really exciting,” says Dr. Diaz, a member of the White House’s National Cancer Advisory Board. “I think this is a great step forward for patients.”...


More at





NY Times Article, June 5, 2022


A Cancer Trial’s Unexpected Result: Remission in Every Patient


The study was small, and experts say it needs to be replicated. But for 18 people with rectal cancer, the outcome led to “happy tears.”


It was a small trial, just 18 rectal cancer patients, every one of whom took the same drug.


But the results were astonishing. The cancer vanished in every single patient, undetectable by physical exam, endoscopy, PET scans or M.R.I. scans.


Dr. Luis A. Diaz Jr. of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, an author of a paper published Sunday in the New England Journal of Medicine describing the results, which were sponsored by the drug company GlaxoSmithKline, said he knew of no other study in which a treatment completely obliterated a cancer in every patient.


“I believe this is the first time this has happened in the history of cancer,” Dr. Diaz said.


Dr. Alan P. Venook, a colorectal cancer specialist at the University of California, San Francisco, who was not involved with the study, said he also thought this was a first…



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