New therapy for battling oft-misdiagnosed neuroendocrine cancer

Neuroendocrine cancer grows slowly and can happen anywhere in your body. As with most cancers, treatment can start with surgery, chemotherapy and radiation. But doctors are now using a targeted, missile-like therapy to destroy the tiniest of these cancer cells.

Steve Jobs and Aretha Franklin both lost their battles with what most people thought was pancreatic cancer. But neuroendocrine tumors were the real culprit.

Neuroendocrine cancer can come from any part of your body—your lungs, your pancreas, your intestines. Symptoms can be varied and go misdiagnosed for years. In fact, 90% of neuroendocrine cancers are misdiagnosed.

Just imagine suffering abdominal pain every six to 12 months. But some more common symptoms could be neuroendocrine cancer. That’s what happened to Robert Hammer.

‘I started coming up with this very itchy rash under my skin, and I have a lot of seasonal allergies in Colorado, so that’s what I maybe thought was happening,” Hammer said.

But a scan revealed that Hammer had a tumor the size of an orange on his pancreas. Surgery to remove his pancreas was too risky. After several other therapies, including hormone therapy, Dr. Eric Liu, a neuroendocrine cancer specialist at Rocky Mountain Cancer Centers, treated Hammer with a new injectable radiation called PRRT.

“The little hormone-guided missile takes it right to the tumor,” Liu said. “The tumor absorbs the radiation. And the neat thing about it is the treatment goes to every single tumor in the body.”

The radiation is given through an IV over several months.

“After [Hammer’s] therapy, a lot of his tumors have disappeared and gotten smaller,” Liu said.

Before the radiation, Hammer was given eight to 12 years to live. Now that number is 18 to 20 years.

“I count every day as a joy,” Hammer said.

Studies show that on average, it takes five years from the onset of symptoms for patients to get the right diagnosis and begin proper treatment. Using injectable radiation to treat it is just the beginning.

Liu believes the PRRT will be used to treat prostate cancer, as well as other kinds of cancer, in the near future.