BURBANK : St. Joseph’s Joins Cancer Study Project

St. Joseph’s Medical Center has joined in a nationwide research project to find a better cure for a rare form of cancer that primarily strikes Chinese and other Asians.

“We’ve got a lot more questions than we’ve got solid answers,” said Dr. Gale Katterhagen, medical director of the cancer center at St. Joseph’s.

The hospital is looking for people with late-stage nasopharynx cancer, cancer behind the nose, for the national study.

“If we can get 10 patients on this, in one or two years we could be a major contributor,” he said.

Only one or two have signed up at St. Joseph’s, Katterhagen said. Nationwide, researchers are trying to find about 200 to 300 patients.

In the United States, of 1.3 million cancer patients less than 1% have the nasal pharynx cancer, Katterhagen said. But on a medical research trip to southern China three years ago, Katterhagen said, “I was just floored with the number of cases I saw.”

Patients in the early stages of the cancer have a 75% survival rate within five years with radiation treatment. But for those who did not start treatment until the later stages, the survival rate drops as low as 25%, Katterhagen said.

In the study, one half of the patients are to be given standard radiation therapy. The other half would be given a form of chemotherapy that has not before been tried on this type of cancer.

The research is being conducted by the Radiation Therapy Oncology Group, a national cancer research group based in Philadelphia.