A UNMC Eppley Institute cancer research team has made promising advances for the treatment of pancreatic cancer.
According to the lead researcher, Professor Pankaj Singh, pancreatic cancer is currently the third leading cause of cancer-related deaths in the United States and may become the second leading cause by 2030. It affects roughly 53,000 people in the U.S. each year.
Singh’s research team described how pancreatic tumors develop resistances to widely used chemotherapy drugs, thereby reducing these drugs’ effectiveness. They identified new chemotherapy combinations which reduce the chances of such resistance developing.
“The idea really is that we want to make tumors respond to therapies. We are developing these combinations. These are definitely not the cure, but hopefully a step in the right direction.”
Singh’s team’s combinations will soon be tested in patients who enroll in clinical trials for pancreatic cancer treatment at UNMC. Singh believes these changes will improve patient survival rates as well as reduce the toxicity associated with pancreatic cancer chemotherapy treatment.
For more information, the website is UNMC.edu/eppley/