Pancreatic cancer is the only cancer case that is still considered a death sentence, Newsmax Health reports.

But a new therapy developed by researchers at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York promises to dramatically improve the survival rate of people who are diagnosed with this deadliest of cancers.

The new therapy combines two proven cancer fighters: the radioactive isotope rhenium-188, and a weakened form of the Listeria monocytogenes bacteria. In a mouse model of pancreatic cancer, researchers Claudia Gravekamp and Ekaterina Dadachova showed that radioactive bacteria eliminated about 50 percent of the primary tumor in the pancreas and an astonishing 90 percent of the distant or metastasized tumors.

Both elements of the new therapy have been tested separately, but this is the first time they’ve been combined.

In their mouse experiments, they found that Listeria alone eliminated only about 54 percent of the distant pancreatic tumors, while radioactive Listeria eliminated about 90 percent of them. The results of their study were published in a recent issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.