Researchers at Seattle's Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center are reporting a possible breakthrough in the understanding of pancreatic cancer, one that has implications for future treatment.
Currently, there is arguably no cancer more deadly than pancreatic cancer, with the lowest published survival rates of any cancer. It is not generally diagnosed until it is in advanced stage, and by then chemotherapy regimens tend to be pointless.
As it turns out, pancreatic tumors have a way of walling themselves off from the body's circulation, so that even when a patient receives chemotherapy, the drugs never reach the tumor because of that wall.
However, when Fred Hutchinson researchers combined the chemo drug Gemcitabine with an enzyme known as PEGPH20, which restores blood vessel activity with the tumor, in mice with this cancer, they found that these pancreatic tumors shrank or stopped growing.
Human clinical trials are still a year or more away, but these findings offer some hope.
Source: Voice of America
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