Those patients who had these operations, who did not have any therapy up front but went straight to the operating room, they didn't do well long-term. But we did find out that those patients that had some form of therapy prior to their operation has significantly improved outcomes long-term.
We've also found there are short-term outcomes in terms of our complication rates, etc. has decreased over time. And thus, all in all, it's showing that these patients who are typically not the offered an operation can have both good short-term and long-term results.
We're definitely seeing a big revolution. A lot of this has to do with better chemotherapy drugs, which are much more effective, utilization of what we call multi-modal therapy, chemotherapy, radiation, and then an aggressive operation. And now we can potentially offer these therapies to patients who had previously had no other options.
The key thing is the sense of optimism that there are options. Not everyone wants to sign up for these big operations or there's long protocols of chemotherapy and radiation. But just having the options available to them to make that educated decision about whether this is something that would benefit them. Otherwise, they had no options there told has nothing to do, go home and make arrangements, we're offering them some additional bit of hope for a pretty large, substantial number of patients that had been previously ignored.
We found that the median survival, meaning the average number, the average duration of life after they'd go through this protocol is now approaching four years, which is about four times that would normally be done in patients who would not have undergone an operation. We additionally found that those patients that get more chemotherapy prior to their operation do significantly better. Those patients who had a tumor marker, which is a blood test that they measure, if it's elevated prior at the diagnosis and if it comes back to normal, those patients also do significantly better.
And then obviously once we take the cancer out and our pathologist looks at it under microscope, if just minimal residual cancer again, those patients do significantly better. So we're hoping that this will now spread to the rest of the country. Now people have a roadmap of how to treat these patients where it's been difficult anatomical circumstances that hopefully it'll be all chemotherapy upfront, maximize the duration of chemotherapy, followed by radiation therapy to help with an eventual operation. And then to take these people to the operating room with all the other metrics are aligning.