Pancreatic Cancer Case Study

Pancreatic cancer (PaCa) is a rapidly progressive and metastatic cancer with the lowest survival of any human cancer. Resistance of PaCa to current treatment regimens contributes to the dismal prognosis of this malignancy. There have been over ten phase II/III clinical trials aiming at curing PaCa during the past decade without significant success. In fact, a recent trial showing that Abraxane when combined with gemcitabine improved the overall patient survival by 1.8 months compared to gemcitabine alone was considered a success despite marginal benefits. Of particular importance, military personnel and military veterans are at significantly greater risk for pancreatic cancer compared to the general population likely due to greater environmental exposures to risk factors know to be associated with this cancer.
One is that we have developed a method to isolate and grow cancer cells that are circulating in the blood both in culture and in experimental animals. This is an extremely important advance because we demonstrated the cells from the PaCa patient that are circulating in the blood are able to spread and create metastases in other organs. The spreading and metastases are the factors that result in death from the cancer. We propose to study the cancer cells circulating the blood to find out if they are different in different stages of the cancer and if there are markers or identifiers on different groups of the circulating cancer cells. Having ways to identify different types of circulating cancer cells between patients, from the same patient and with different phases of the disease will provide us a way to develop improved treatments at individualized