MD Anderson’s strength is two-fold.
First, we have specialists who care for patients with these tumors all day, every day. And we see plenty of rare and unusual cases even among neuroendocrine tumors. So our neuroendocrine tumor specialists have a lot of individual and collective experience deciding on which treatments to use and in what order.
Second is our clinical trial options. Most of the FDA-approved treatments for neuroendocrine tumors were tested at MD Anderson through clinical trials. We have been one of the largest contributors to their development, and we’ve played a substantial role in the studies of almost all of the drugs that have been approved in this field. That means our patients had access to them long before most people in the general population. One example is everolimus, which James Yao, M.D., was studying as early as 2006 – six years before it was approved by the FDA.