Gastroenterology: Scientists hope to develop a new precision medicine treatment for pancreatic cancer.

15, 2020 // -- In a recent study published in the international journal Gastroenterology, scientists from the University of Glasgow and others developed a new precision medical method to treat DNA damage to cancer cells in the body of pancreatic cancer patients, marking another step forward in the development of potential pancreatic cancer therapies that may hopefully improve outcomes for pancreatic cancer patients with low survival rates in the future.
study, researchers developed new molecular markers to predict which patients would react to drugs that target DNA damage by using cell lineages and organs from the body of pancreatic cancer patients.
researchers tested the markers using a variety of drugs and then developed a therapeutic strategy that could lead to clinical trials that would help researchers predict which patients would respond to the drug, whether alone or in combination.
Photo Source: CC0 Public Domain, a project funded by AstraZenecom, is currently included in the PRIMUS-004 clinical trial, which is part of the Pancreatic Cancer Precision Treatment Development Platform program.
PRIMUS-004 is a ground-breaking clinical trial of pancreatic cancer designed to match patients with more targeted and effective cancer treatments, and for the first time, clinical trials conducted by researchers have brought a precise treatment to pancreatic cancer patients in the UK, which will soon begin recruiting subjects in Glasgow, while 20 other research centres across the UK will continue to follow up on the relevant clinical trials.
Although survival rates for many types of cancer have improved, the improvement in survival rates for pancreatic cancer patients has lagged significantly over the past 40 years, making pancreatic cancer very difficult to treat, in part because it is usually diagnosed only at an advanced stage.
One of the main limitations of effective treatment for pancreatic cancer is that patients have very limited options for treatment, and some pancreatic cancer patients are currently unable to repair DNA damage in cancer cells, which can make cancer very sensitive and vulnerable to new and established drug therapies.
researcher Dr David Chang said: 'The results of this paper are a huge breakthrough for future scientists in the treatment of pancreatic cancer, and we are very pleased that the strategies they have developed have now been incorporated into clinical trials, and for us, precision oncology, from scientific to clinical, may promise to treat pancreatic cancer.'
There is an urgent need for new treatments for pancreatic cancer, a disease that has only a few treatment options and is usually not diagnosed until late in life, so survival rates have been low, and precision research will provide a dynamic approach to help explore new pancreatic cancer targeted therapies, and now researchers are incorporating new drug candidates into priMUS-004 clinical trials, and researchers hope to reveal that the best-performing drug in the lab can also have the same therapeutic effect in pancreatic cancer patients.
the current PRIMUS-004 clinical trial is funded by AstraZeneta and the study is supported by Cancer Research UK.
original source: Stephan B. Dreyer et al. Targeting DNA Damage Response and Replication Stress in Pancreatic Cancer, Gastroenterology (2020). DOI: 10.1053/j.gastro.2020.09.043.