News & Publications

For MCC patients who have local disease, the standard treatment course is surgery followed by radiation therapy. However, it is not known how quickly surgery should be followed by radiation, and there are often delays in radiation treatment due to surgical wound healing and logistics. The authors an...

When treating Merkel cell carcinoma (MCC) that hasn't spread beyond the primary site yet, doctors often use surgery, but the type of best surgical approach is unclear. These authors looked at two types of surgery: one where they remove thin layers of skin and check them under a microscope during t...

The ideal duration for continuing immunotherapy is still being studied. This study assessed 25 patients who stopped avelumab (a type of immunotherapy) after 1 year of treatment (26 infusions) and a PET/CT scan that confirmed a complete response to the treatment. The study found that 88% of these pat...

How long an MCC patient should continue to receive immunotherapy treatment is unclear. This study aimed to investigate whether reduced frequency dosing (giving immunotherapy less often) is effective in preventing the cancer from coming back, while also lowering patient costs and increasing convenien...

MCC is commonly treated first with surgery to remove the tumor, followed by radiation therapy (called “adjuvant” radiation, after there is no obvious remaining cancer). This study of 1,965 MCC patients examined whether delayed start of the adjuvant radiation affected the overall survival o...

In this clinical trial, patients who had their MCC removed by surgery were just observed, or given nivolumab, an immunotherapy drug, to assess whether it decreased their chance of MCC recurring. The findings revealed that people who used nivolumab after surgery had 42% less chance of recurrence afte...

This study performed in France examined how adding radiation treatment may affect the chance of MCC recurrence. The study focused on patients whose cancer was limited to a local site or had spread to nearby areas like lymph nodes, but not distant parts of the body. Some patients only had surgery, wh...

In a recent study, researchers studied how combining radiation therapy with immunotherapy drugs like avelumab or pembrolizumab could help patients with advanced Merkel cell carcinoma (MCC) whose disease got worse despite just immunotherapy. They included eight patients with tumors suitable for radia...

In this study, authors looked at how well avelumab, an immunotherapy drug, works in treating advanced Merkel cell carcinoma. They included patients who hadn't gotten any treatment before and those who had received treatments like chemotherapy. The results showed that avelumab helped patients, with a...

Our team based in Seattle conducted a comprehensive review including evolving trends in the management of Merkel cell carcinoma (MCC). This summary covers key decision points, including recommended work-up during initial diagnosis, treatment options for MCC when it's in one place or has spread, mana...