Working to Improve Cancer Surgery Outcomes

When your child has cancer surgery at Cincinnati Children’s, you can take comfort in knowing we provide advanced, research-driven care.

Outside the operating room, our surgical oncologists are also researchers. We lead studies to assess how the use of certain surgical tools, technologies and techniques impact long-term outcomes. Then, we use those insights to further improve treatments—ensuring children have access to the safest, most effective surgical options available.

For example, some of the questions our researchers are working to answer include:

• Can surgery play a role in treating Ewing sarcoma that’s spread to the lungs, even though standard treatments are currently nonsurgical?
• Compared to standard surgery, is fluorescence-guided surgery (a technique that makes tumors glow) more likely to achieve complete tumor removal?
• Can we prove that one approach for removing certain tumors is more effective than another?

Collaborating with Other Top Researchers

We bring together (and partner with) researchers from around the world in order to make a larger impact in the field of surgical oncology. For example, cancer surgeons from Cincinnati Children’s have leadership roles with:

• The Pediatric Surgical Oncology Research Collaborative. Our surgeons founded this group of researchers representing nearly 50 pediatric cancer institutions across North America. Its members collaborate on large, multi-center studies to see how surgery can be better optimized as a treatment for solid tumors.
• The Children’s Oncology Group (COG). This group of more than 10,000 cancer experts is supported by the National Cancer Institute. As the world’s largest organization devoted to pediatric cancer research, it has nearly 100 active clinical trials open to patients at any given time. Some of our surgeons lead surgical research initiatives within the COG.