Swim Across America grant funding of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center clinical trial shows that immunotherapy alone could replace surgery, enabling patients to regain their organs and enhance their quality of life

Andrea Cercek, MD, was part of the team, with Luis Diaz Jr., MD, at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, that demonstrates how immunotherapy alone can help patients with MMRd cancers avoid surgery and preserve their quality of life. The results, presented simultaneously at the 2025 American Association of Cancer Research (AACR) Annual Meeting and The New England Journal of Medicine, showed that 80% of patients with several types of cancer treated with immunotherapy did not require surgery, ra Credit: Memorial Sloan Kettering

“Grants provided by Swim Across America were critical to our initial study and advancing this trial to phase 2,” said Luis Diaz, M.D., gastrointestinal oncologist and Head of the Division of Solid Tumor Oncology at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, when referring to the groundbreaking clinical trials on using immunotherapy to treat MMRd cancers. Credit: Memorial Sloan Kettering