In a new study, researchers have found that new drug combos may work better for treating pancreatic cancer.
The research was conducted by a team at Columbia University and elsewhere.
Unlike many other cancers, most pancreatic tumors are rock hard.
That’s one reason why pancreatic cancer is one of the most lethal types of cancer.
Pancreatic tumors use a thick layer of connective tissue called stroma that hardens the tumor and acts as a shield.
As a result, most chemotherapy drugs can’t build-up to the levels needed to be effective.
For a pancreatic cancer drug to be effective, it needs to stick around long enough to seep past the stroma and accumulate in the tumor.
But if it is going to persist for a long time in the blood, it can’t be as toxic to the rest of the body.
In the study, the team identified a good drug candidate.
The drug, an experimental compound called PTC596 that had shown antitumor activity in mouse and human pancreatic cancer cells, seemed to have the right qualities:
PTC596 has a durable half-life (most cancer drugs have a half-life of a few minutes to hours) and can evade a pump that many cancer cells use to expel drugs.
This means that any amount of drug that makes it past the barrier can target the malignant cells.
Based on those studies, the team tested PTC596 in combination with gemcitabine (the first-line drug for pancreatic cancer) in mice with pancreatic cancer that is generally resistant to chemotherapy.
The mice that were treated with the two-drug combination lived three times longer than those treated with only a single standard agent.
This result was exciting because it’s exceedingly rare for any treatment to extend survival in this gold-standard mouse model.
They also tested PTC596 in combination with gemcitabine and another drug commonly used to treat pancreatic cancer, nab-paclitaxel, using human pancreatic tumors grown in mice.
This combination further enhanced efficacy, making the tumors shrink outright.
The team says based on the drug’s safety profile and our own findings, there’s a good rationale for testing PTC596 in combination with standard therapy in patients with pancreatic cancer.
One author of the study is Kenneth Olive, Ph.D., associate professor of medicine and pathology & cell biology at Columbia University.
The study is published in Clinical Cancer Research.
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