When Scott Goedeke was diagnosed with a rare and aggressive melanoma three years ago, he turned to Dr. George Ansstas, a WashU oncologist at Siteman Cancer Center.
“I learned rather quickly how fortunate I am to be in St. Louis,” Goedeke says. A top authority on Goedeke’s type of cancer, Ansstas was also a lead investigator for an immunotherapy trial for which Goedeke was a candidate. When the first treatment wasn’t successful, Ansstas suggested another groundbreaking procedure using tumor-infiltrating lymphocyte cells, a form of immunotherapy that bolsters the body’s natural cancer-killing immune system.
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Following the treatment, Goedeke has been cancer free since March 2023. “It’s nothing short of a miracle for me,” he says. “The advances have been amazing—10 years ago, virtually no one had access to immunotherapy.”
As Goedeke discovered, St. Louis cancer care providers are making breakthroughs in treatments while expanding access. Siteman Cancer Center at Barnes-Jewish Hospital and Washington University School of Medicine, for example, is among 72 National Cancer Institute–designated cancer centers in the country. Siteman specializes not only in treatment but also research and education.
Besides the treatment that Goedeke received, Siteman has developed countless specialized interventions, notes Dr. Timothy Eberlein, founding director of Siteman Cancer Center and a Washington University surgeon. “These are tomorrow’s treatments, delivered today,” he says. Examples include multidisciplinary hyperthermic intraperitoneal chemotherapy treatment for abdominal cancers, in which chemotherapy drugs are directly inserted into the abdomen. Neoadjuvant treatment for rectal cancer helps shrink tumors before surgery and can make a significant difference in patients’ quality of life. NK cell therapy, which harnesses the immune system’s “natural killer” cells, has shown great promise for children with leukemia.
Siteman is also making advances in prevention and access. Its Program for the Elimination of Cancer Disparities has reduced higher rates of incidence of advanced breast cancer in African American women in the St. Louis region and colorectal cancer in the Missouri bootheel. In addition, two cancer tests created at Siteman—GatewaySeq and ChromoSeq—are now approved for use by Medicare and Medicaid.
Patient access will further improve this fall with the opening of the Siteman Ambulatory Cancer Building, which will emphasize interdisciplinary care by WashU physicians and strengthen connections between research and clinical care.
Meanwhile, St. Luke’s Hospital is making significant strides of its own. St. Luke’s Center for Cancer Care is currently the only community hospital in the metro area that offers bispecific immunotherapy treatment, which harnesses the body’s unaltered immune system by using a type of white blood cell to attack and kill cancer cells. Presently, bispecifics are only FDA-approved for patients with non-Hodgkin lymphoma or multiple myeloma who have relapsed, usually after multiple treatments. St. Luke’s immunotherapy program is focused on providing these treatments to blood cancer patients sooner by offering an array of clinical trial options.
St. Luke’s is also the first site activated in the nation for two potentially transformative Phase 3 clinical trials for newly diagnosed patients who have the most common subtypes of non-Hodgkin lymphoma: diffuse large B-cell lymphoma and follicular lymphoma. According to Dr. Mark Fesler, St. Luke’s Center for Cancer Care hematologic malignancy specialist and director of bispecific immunotherapy, the initiative could mean using fewer treatments that have negative side effects, such as chemotherapy or bone marrow transplants, along with the potential for improved cure rates and survival. “It’s exciting to bring this type of novel, complex therapy into a community cancer setting,” Fesler says.
