Pancreatic cancer

Engineers at Duke University have developed a novel delivery system for cancer treatment involving a radioactive implant, and demonstrated its potential against one of the disease’s most troublesome forms: pancreatic cancer.

Scientists at Cambridge have identified a protein that plays a key role in cancer metastasis, which not only hints at a new potential treatment but reveals for the first time that this process isn’t unique to cancer, as previously thought.

Getting cancer drugs to the right place in the right quantities is a perpetual problem for medical scientists, but a group from University of California, Los Angeles has developed a new drug delivery system to address the problem.

Pancreatic cancer is one of the most deadly forms of the disease, resistant to many treatments. Now, scientists have identified how the tumors protect themselves so well – and more importantly, found a way to potentially bust through those defenses.

Treatments like chemo and immunotherapy haven't been very effective against pancreatic cancer. In a new mouse study, scientists have found that blocking an inflammatory pathway helps make this deadly cancer vulnerable to these therapies.

Lab-grown replicas of the pancreas have been developed by scientists at MIT, with the team hopeful the technology behind them can not just help develop new drugs for cancers afflicting the organ, but other particularly deadly types as well.

In the wide-ranging search for new weapons against cancer, some see great potential in the idea of a urine test that can reveal telltale signs of the disease. So where does the technology stand right now?

New preclinical work has found a combination of three experimental immunotherapy drugs could help shrink pancreatic tumors. Each of the drugs have demonstrated safety in early human trials and the hope is to begin testing the triple combo by the end 2021.

Difficult to detect and with a low survival rate, pancreatic cancer is one of the most insidious forms of the disease. But now, researchers have identified an existing drug that could fight pancreatic cancer by targeting a key gene mutation.

Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have developed an electronic nose that may be able to sniff out signs of cancer from blood plasma samples. In tests, the device was able to detect a range of cancer types with over 90 percent accuracy.

Researchers in Canada have made a significant discovery relating to pancreatic cancer, pinpointing a protein that the cancer cells rely on for growth, and demonstrating how targeting them can inhibit tumor growth in the lab.

A research team at Columbia University has made an exciting discovery, finding that a compound currently under development for a rare kidney stone disease can starve pancreatic cancer cells of a key amino acid they depend on for survival.