[ad_1]
A new drug that prevents pancreatic cancer from becoming resistant to treatment could be a breakthrough in the fight against this deadly disease.
Pancreatic cancer is the third most lethal type of cancer because the disease is usually diagnosed too late and chemotherapy stops having an effect on tumors.
Cracking the code to both of these problems could ultimately strike the victim more than five years after the diagnosis.
New drug developed by researchers at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center could make pancreatic cancer vulnerable and strengthen other treatments, increasing survival rates by up to 50%, according to early tests in mice .
Pancreatic cancer is difficult to catch due to organ localization and difficult to treat because of resistance to chemotherapy, but a new drug has eliminated the ability of cancer to fight chemotherapy in mice
The advent of chemotherapy in the 1940s changed the way we think about cancer.
Once it was a death sentence, and now it is often a manageable disease.
But pancreatic cancer is the exception.
Other cancers are diagnosed earlier and have become less fatal. Diagnoses of pancreatic cancer and deaths increase.
The latest figures from the American Cancer Society estimate that pancreatic cancer will be diagnosed in 55,440 Americans in 2018.
Its prevalence has increased by about one percent each year, but its survival rate has not changed.
Nine percent, or 44,330 people, will die of the disease in 2018, as did the legend of the soul, Aretha Franklin, earlier this year, as thousands of others in previous years .
Many of these patients are diagnosed in the third or fourth stage disease simply because the location of the pancreas in the center of the body makes it difficult to detect symptoms before the tumors are metastasized.
Thus, until medical imaging, such as computed tomography, is affordable enough to allow more patients to do more regularly, there is not much to do in terms of early diagnosis.
Even more discouraging for patients, we recently learned that some pancreatic cancer cells were virtually immune to chemotherapy.
The treatment may seem to start acting against parts of the tumors, and then seems to stop working.
Scientists think it's because cancer "learns" which cells are vulnerable and which ones are resistant. While chemo eliminates the weaker cells, the resistant ones multiply.
The drug then fights in a lost battle.
One of the ways that scientists suspect that the pancreas becomes resistant begins with the stellar cells of the pancreas itself (rather than by tumors).
When activated, these cells become more fibrous and harder. When this happens at a healthy pace, the stars help protect the pancreas.
This protective effect can be harmful to the organ if the stars are too active or stay too long, blocking the function of the pancreas.
Cancer activates these armor cells and forms a difficult scar tissue. This scar tissue prevents chemotherapy from reaching its target.
The proliferation of hard scar stellates also seems to excite cancer, encouraging its faster growth and spread.
But a new drug, called metavert, could thwart this process, according to the new Cedars-Sinai study.
The team discovered that the metavert, which they have been developing for three years, not only prevented and fought resistance to chemotherapy, but also seemed to improve the effectiveness of chemotherapy and radiotherapy treatments in the mouse.
In fact, the treatment improved survival rates by 50% in one of the series of mouse studies.
"This is an exciting step towards improving survival rates for patients with pancreatic cancer," said lead author of the study, Dr. Mouad Edderkaoui.
He and his team are already creating a version of the drug that can be tested in human patients, and that might be their best hope of overcoming vicious cancer.
Source link
