In a new study, researchers found that a combination therapy may improve health outcomes for patients with pancreatic cancer.
They found that using a therapeutic compound, called SapC-DOPS, a nanovesicle (or a nanotechnology drug delivery system) made of microscopic components of a cell, to deliver a combined biomarker target therapy and standard chemotherapy for pancreatic cancer may show benefit to patients.
The research was conducted by a team at the University of Cincinnati.
Currently, only a small number of promising drugs target pancreatic cancer, which is the fourth-leading cause of cancer deaths, with a five-year survival of less than 6%.
Pancreatic cancer is usually asymptomatic in the early stages, while frequently invading lymph nodes and the liver, and less often the lungs and visceral organs.
Current treatments, including surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation therapy, have failed to improve long-term survival.
Previously, the team had discovered a drug-targetable biomarker (phosphatidylserine) for pancreatic cancer cells in previous studies, and one of the first-line treatments for advanced pancreatic cancer is chemotherapy, but it only provides marginal improvements for patients.
In this study, they wanted to see if they could use the current first-line treatment in combination with the novel nanovesicle drug delivery to improve outcomes.
They used both animal models and human cancer cells to test this theory and found that the combination of these therapies together helped to target the biomarker on the cancer cell surface at various points in their life cycle, ultimately inhibiting tumor growth and potentially increasing survival, in comparison to the treatments alone.
This study shows that the combination treatment using the nanovesicles and standard chemotherapy could be beneficial for patients with pancreatic cancer, possibly extending lives and helping a subset of patients with cancer that don’t have many options.
One author of the study is Kombo N’Guessan, Ph.D.
The study is published in Molecular Therapy.
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