New Findings on Pancreatic Cancer Give Hope for Early Detection

Pancreatic cancer has one of the lowest five-year survival rates of all cancer types: just 5%. This is typically because it is not detected until it has reached a highly aggressive stage. Recent studies at Johns Hopkins University found that approximately fifteen years pass between the first cancer-causing mutations and the start of the stage in which the cells metastasize and become deadly.

In the study, scientists examined the genomes of patients who had died of late-stage pancreatic cancer. The tumor cells contained various mutations which were analyzed in a mathematical model to determine their age. The models suggested that the cells arose approximately ten years after the mutation, dispelling the popular belief that pancreatic cancer is too aggressive for screening to be effective. On the contrary, a screening that detects cancerous pancreatic cells could be highly promising and increase survival rates because the cancer could be treated before metastasizing aggressively.

Some screening techniques are already being tested. A year ago, UCLA scientists identified RNA that could indicate cancer in the saliva of treatable pancreatic cancer patients. There are also advances in optical technology (endoscopy) that uses light scattering to recognize cancerous cells. Until those technologies are made commercially available, doctors will be limited to screening high-risk patients using other imaging techniques like CT scans or MRI. While those techniques can (and have) saved lives with early detection, the recent findings about the timeline of pancreatic cancer could make development of alternatives more worthwhile.

This article caught my attention because of some of the recent imaging tests that I had to undergo recently. Given the wide variety of cancers, it'd be one's hope that doctors could screen for multiple cancers (or diseases in general) with a simple and minimally invasive test. I'd like to see technology move in the direction of effectively consolidating those tests - maybe the salivary analysis could someday be an easy lifesaver for many.

Scientific American, Feb. 2011
"How Old Is Your Cancer?"
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=how-old-is-your-cancer

Researchers Find Drug That Reverses Resistance to Chemotherapy in Pancreatic Cancer

Researchers have shown that inhibiting TAK-1, an enzyme which is activated by a regulatory protein called Transforming Growth Factor beta (TGFbeta) in pancreatic cancer, could make pancreatic cancer cells more sensitive to chemotherapy possibly leading to a new drug for treatment. According to Dr. Davide Melisi of the National Cancer Institute in Italy, "Pancreatic cancer is an incurable malignancy, resistant to every anti-cancer treatment. Targeting TAK-1 could be a strategy to revert this resistance, increasing the the efficacy of chemotherapy."


To test this new discovery, Dr. Melisi along with his colleagues developed a drug that inhibited TAK-1 and tested the activity of the TAK-1 inhibitor on its own and combined it with 3 other anti-cancer drugs on mice. When combined with anti-cancer drugs, doses up to 70 times lower than with the anti-cancer drugs by themselves were used to target the same number of cancer cells and had a profound effect such as reducing the tumour volume, extending mice survival, and lowering the toxicity levels. In this study, the median average survival for the control, gemcitabine (common anti-cancer drug) on its own, TAK-1 inhibitor, and the combination of the TAK-1 and gemcitabine yielded 68, 82,87, 122 days respectively.


I found this article very interesting and exciting because this could lead to the breakthrough that scientists have been looking for for a long time because once pancreatic cancer has mestastized, it is very difficult to treat and the survival rate is low. Knowing that scientists have located and could possibly target TAK-1 in making chemotherapy more effective just shows how far the medical and scientific world has come and that we are at the very edge of a cure to this cancer. Being an RHEN major, this article gives more of an insight of the advances towards the treatment as well as another solution to cure pancreatic cancer.


http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/165293.php