Pancreatic cancer tagged posts

Normal and cancerous pancreatic tissue. The blue background represents the cells that produce digestive juices supplied by the pancreas to the gut, and the red dots—seen only in the cancerous pancreas—represent the bacteria found to be a thousand times more abundant than normal.

Antibiotics may make immunotherapy more effective against pancreatic cancer. The population of bacteria in the pancreas increases more than a thousand fold in patients with pancreatic cancer, and becomes dominated by species that prevent the immune system from attacking tumor cells. These are the findings of a study conducted in mice and in patients with pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDA), a form of cancer that is usually fatal within two years...

Gold Nanoparticle Reprograms Pancreatic Tumor Microenvironment and Inhibits Tumor Growth

A diagnosis of pancreatic cancer is often a death sentence because chemotherapy and radiation have little impact on the disease. In the U.S. this year, some 53,000 new cases will be diagnosed, and 42,000 patients will die of the disease, according to the National Institutes of Health. But research now being reported in ACS Nano could eventually lead to a new type of treatment based on gold nanoparticles.

Scientists have previously studied these tiny gold particles as a vehicle to carry chemotherapy drug molecules into tumors or as a target to enhance the impact of radiation on tumors...

Engineering T cells to treat pancreatic cancer Researchers hope to have a human version of the T cell in clinical trials this year

Hingorani, a pancreatic cancer specialist, teamed up with Fred Hutch immunotherapy experts Drs. Phil Greenberg and Ingunn Stromnes in successful efforts to breach the cancer’s physical and immunological walls using immunotherapy, a type of treatment that harnesses or refines the body’s own immune system with T-cells engineered to recognize and destroy cancer cells.

Specifically, Hingorani’s team created T cells with a high ffinity to a “relatively” tumor-specific antigen. Why relatively? Notoriously difficult pancreatic tumor cells don’t produce many unique proteins that allow for completely tumor-specific T cells...