Los Robles, UCLA Center Link Cancer Programs

Los Robles Regional Medical Center in Thousand Oaks announced Tuesday a formal affiliation between its cancer program and a prestigious oncology center at UCLA, attempting to match the advantages of a major research center with the convenience of a local hospital.

The new agreement came less than two weeks after cross-town rival Westlake Medical Center opened its own $10-million, Comprehensive Cancer Center.

The new affiliation means that Los Robles cancer patients may soon participate in many of UCLA’s experimental clinical trials without leaving Thousand Oaks.

Los Robles oncologists will also join the UCLA faculty and receive extended medical education in new cancer therapies from physicians now practicing at the university’s Bowyer Oncology Center.

“This enhances our patient care and adds the one missing link to our community program,” said Dr. Harry Menco, an oncologist and chairman of Los Robles’ Oncology Advisory Board. “What you are seeing here is a visionary approach.”

Los Robles already has an extensive oncology unit at the hospital and will not need to add any facilities, hospital officials said. The agreement does not involve any financial arrangement between UCLA and Los Robles, officials at the two medical centers said.

Officials at Salick Health Care Inc.--the corporation that co-owns and manages the Westlake cancer center--sharply criticized the new arrangement as merely a copycat measure that will not succeed in siphoning patients from the Westlake facility.

“All of a sudden, they are in the cancer business,” said Les Bell, Salick’s executive vice president and chief financial officer. “It is a last-gasp effort by someone who has nothing else to do.”

Los Robles officials counter that they were negotiating the new arrangement with UCLA months before they heard that Westlake Medical Center would build a new cancer facility. They said they are confident Los Robles Medical Center will win the competition for local cancer patients’ business.

“Health care is changing everywhere,” Menco said. “There may not be room for everyone, and the best will survive.”

The agreement between UCLA and Los Robles--initiated about a year ago by doctors at Los Robles--is the university oncology center’s first affiliation with a local hospital, though UCLA officials say more such deals with other hospitals in the region are in the planning stages.

The desire to affiliate with local hospitals such as Los Robles comes from a change of administration at UCLA’s oncology center, and from public pressure to see cancer research bear fruit more quickly than in the past, said Dr. John Glaspy, director of UCLA’s Bowyer Center and assistant professor of hematology-oncology at the UCLA School of Medicine.

The UCLA center gets many requests for affiliation from local hospitals throughout the Los Angeles area, Glaspy said. “What’s really happened now is we’re returning the phone calls,” he said.

Glaspy said that by including Los Robles cancer patients in many of UCLA’s clinical trials, researchers could work from a larger patient base to discover much sooner which cancer therapies work better than others.

“Our mission here is not to attract business to ourselves,” Glaspy said. “We want to improve access to what we have that is special and to advance our knowledge of cancer therapies more quickly.”

Tuesday’s announcement leaves Thousand Oaks with some of the most sophisticated cancer care of any comparably sized city in Southern California.

On the city’s east side, Westlake Medical Center’s new cancer center features noted oncologists culled from hospitals around the country and a state-of-the-art, high-tech facility that will soon offer bone marrow transplants on site.

Dr. Robert Peter Gayle, a pioneer in bone marrow transplants renowned for his work with victims of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, will head up the bone marrow transplant program.

Gayle moved to Westlake Medical from UCLA’s oncology center--the same center that just affiliated with Los Robles. In fact, Los Robles officials say one of the advantages of their affiliation with UCLA will be easier patient access to UCLA’s bone marrow transplant program.

It is an advantage Allyson Ranallo of Thousand Oaks can well understand. Ranallo, 29, nearly landed in UCLA’s bone-marrow transplant program this summer after diagnosis at Los Robles of a “large, very aggressive” malignant tumor in her breast.

The doctors at UCLA and Los Robles believe that given her young age and the size of the tumor, such a drastic measure might be necessary to save her life, Ranallo said. When the cancer proved not to have invaded her lymph nodes, however, the physicians decided the risk was no longer warranted, she said.

“I find many doctors over here (in Thousand Oaks) are slower to adapt new things,” she said. “Many of the surgeons like to do what they’ve always done. But patients need to be exposed to cutting edge, brand-new stuff. They do things there (at UCLA) that can potentially save lives.”