January 09, 2025
Pancreatic cancer is a very challenging disease. It’s tough to catch early, spreads rapidly, and doesn’t respond easily to treatment.
This year, pancreatic cancer is expected to be the 12th most common cancer, but the National Cancer Institute (NCI) predicts it will cause the third highest number of cancer deaths. By 2030, it’s projected to become the second leading cause of cancer deaths in the U.S. This is because pancreatic cancer is often found too late for effective treatment.
But there is hope on the horizon. Researchers seem to be making progress in improving treatments for this aggressive disease. Here’s what you need to know about pancreatic cancer, its treatments, and the promising breakthroughs in the works.
The pancreas is a large gland in the back of the abdomen. It has two functions: Making enzymes that help digest food and producing hormones that control the amount of sugar in the bloodstream.
Because the pancreas is located behind other organs, it’s hard for doctors to detect tumors there during routine exams. To make matters worse, pancreatic cancer often doesn’t cause symptoms until it’s spread beyond the pancreas. As a result, survival rates are currently low. However, recent advances in pancreatic cancer detection are offering hope, with new techniques and technologies aiming to identify the disease earlier, when treatment may be more effective.
For now, surgery is a major treatment strategy for pancreatic cancer, but it’s only an option in about 20 percent of cases. There are four types of pancreatic cancer based on how it can be treated with surgery:
Other pancreatic cancer treatments include:
• Chemotherapy, which uses drugs to kill cancer cells. It also kills normal cells, resulting in negative side effects.
• Radiation therapy, which uses powerful energy beams aimed at cancer cells to minimize damage to healthy cells.
• Immunotherapy, which uses medicines to help the immune system find and kill cancer cells.
• Targeted therapy, which targets pancreatic cancer cells to stop their growth.
Doctors may use these treatments individually or together to shrink a tumor before surgery, kill any cancer cells left after surgery, or to ease symptoms when surgery isn’t an option.
Pancreatic cancer research covers everything from studies focused on understanding the disease better to clinical trials testing new treatments that could soon be widely used.
Researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, are developing a drug that targets a genetic mutation responsible for nearly half of all pancreatic cancer cases. Clinical trials could start within a couple of years.
In another promising study, researchers found that a new drug, BXCL701, makes pancreatic cancer cells more receptive to immunotherapy. This drug is currently being tested in combination with an existing immunotherapy treatment in clinical trials and has shown encouraging results.
There’s also a national clinical trial testing the effectiveness of a new chemotherapy delivery method. Pancreatic tumors are surrounded by scar tissue that makes it hard for drugs to reach the cancer. This new method aims to break through that barrier of scar tissue and deliver chemotherapy directly to the tumor.
One recent DNA discovery involves the gene HNF4A, which helps organs function. Pancreatic cancer cells appear to disable this gene, allowing them to grow rapidly. While this knowledge won’t bring immediate changes in treatment, it could lead to a targeted therapy for the disease in the future.
Pancreatic cancer has long been one of the deadliest forms of cancer, with treatment advances coming at a frustratingly slow pace. But thanks to new discoveries and cutting-edge research, that pace is picking up. If some of these new treatments prove as effective as they seem, the outlook for people facing pancreatic cancer could improve dramatically in the years to come.
