In a new study, researchers have developed a new “precision medicine” approach to treat the damaged DNA in the cancer cells of pancreatic cancer patients.
The findings mark an important step for potential treatment options for pancreatic cancer, improving the options and outcomes for a disease where survival rates have remained very low.
The research was conducted by a team at the University of Glasgow.
Although survival for many types of cancer has improved, pancreatic cancer survival has lagged significantly behind in the last 40 years.
The disease is particularly hard to treat, partly because it’s often diagnosed at a late stage.
A major limitation of treating pancreatic cancer effectively is that there are very few treatment options for patients with the disease.
Currently, some patients with pancreatic cancer cannot repair damaged DNA in the cancer cells, which makes cancer vulnerable to some new and established drug treatments.
In the study, the team used cell lines and organoids that were generated from patients with pancreatic cancer to develop new markers that can predict who will respond to drugs targeting DNA damage.
The researchers tested these markers using multiple drugs, and have developed a strategy that is now being taken forward into a clinical trial.
The trial will help doctors and researchers predict which patient will respond to which one of these drugs, either alone or in combination.
Funding for the trail has come from AstraZeneca and will now be included in the PRIMUS-004 clinical trial as part of the Precision-Panc therapeutic development platform for pancreatic cancer.
One author of the study is Dr. David Chang, from the University of Glasgow’s Institute of Cancer Sciences.
The study is published in Gastroenterology.
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