Cancer Centres

There are no success rates here, and that is deliberate. No honest ones exist.

Per-centre survival figures are not published in the United States or Germany. Where raw numbers do exist, they run backwards: the strongest centres take the hardest cases, so unadjusted survival ranks them lower. Adjusting for that needs stage and genetic detail that the registries do not hold.

So this list is never sorted by anything resembling quality, and carries no case volume either — a volume column reads as a score whether or not it is labelled one.

What can be said honestly is about a class of centre rather than any single one. The WiZen study, funded by the German Innovation Fund, compared routine care data across tens of thousands of patients and found treatment in a certified centre associated with better survival:

Colon cancer

11% lower risk of death within five years

Rectal cancer

9% lower risk of death within five years

Breast cancer, stage I–III

Hazard ratio 0.89 (95% CI 0.85–0.93)

One limit, stated plainly: the breast-cancer benefit was not statistically significant at stage IV. If your disease has spread, this evidence does not say certified centres do better — it says the question has not been answered for you.

Germany. Roughly 1,700 centres certified by the Deutsche Krebsgesellschaft are not here yet, because whether their register may be republished is unsettled. They are the centres the WiZen findings above were measured on.

Accreditation beyond NCI. About 1,400 US hospitals hold Commission on Cancer accreditation and treat most newly diagnosed patients. That is a much broader list than this one, and a correspondingly weaker signal.

Eight designated centres are not on this page at all. Cold Spring Harbor, Salk, Wistar, the Koch Institute and the Jackson Laboratory among them. They hold NCI designation for laboratory research and treat no patients, so listing them would send someone looking for treatment to a research institute.