News & Publications

The work done by the Seattle MCC Team is being featured at significant European meetings and is briefly summarized in this newsletter of the European Academy of Dermato-Oncology (EADO) a top organization focused in skin cancer in Europe.

Patients who experience a recurrence of their Merkel cell carcinoma are often treated aggressively. We report a case of a man with an unusually long course of MCC over 15 years who had his MCC recur around his face or neck 7 times before eventually developing distant spread. Because he had 4 major ...

There is an urgent need to find ways to help patients who do not have a persistent response to immune ‘checkpoint’ therapy for MCC. This review details surprising new findings from multiple labs that suggest such patients might benefit from blocking the ‘sensor’ a cancer cell uses to verify ...

This study provides evidence of frequent and durable responses to avelumab (anti-PD-L1) when patients receive such immune stimulation before starting traditional chemotherapy.

This year's 15th annual MMIG meeting was the first MMIG meeting to take place over Zoom and had a record setting number of attendees (104)!

Managing MCC that recurs in patients who are immune suppressed due to an organ transplant (kidney, heart, etc) is a special challenge, as the immune therapies that block the PD1 pathway will cause rejection of the transplanted organ. This case shows the capacity of local immune therapy (with an inje...

This is a comprehensive analysis of 52 previously published studies across 1804 patients with Merkel cell carcinoma, addressing which approaches are most effective in preventing MCC recurrences. Because national databases do not capture recurrence data (only death) such studies must be done by local...

What makes life-saving discoveries possible? For patients like Peter Stults, they might say researchers and physicians such as those at UW Medicine. For researchers and physicians, they would say the generosity of spirit of people like Peter. Peter’s estate gift to the Seattle Merkel cell carci...

Although MCC fortunately does not often spread to the brain, this is an especially difficult site to treat. This manuscript summarizes results from four patients that closely mimic our own experience in Seattle. That is, there is a reasonable chance that patients with MCC that has spread to the brai...

In a study of 72 locally advanced MCC (disease involving regional lymph nodes) patients, the authors report that radiation therapy to the lymph nodes improves disease specific survival and reduces regional and distant recurrences.