Many of the world’s leading experts on pancreas cancer gathered recently in a pancreas cancer Think Tank in Park City, Utah. The group met to push forward progress against the disease, saying improvements in treatment have been too few, and outlining a strategic plan to make progress at a more rapid rate.
Of the estimated 28,300 patients diagnosed with pancreas cancer in the US last year, fewer than 5% are expected to survive five or more years, notes Margaret A.Tempero, MD, deputy director of the University of California San Francisco Comprehensive Cancer Center, and co-chair of the symposium.
Pancreas Cancer Presents Unique Combination of Difficulties
"Pancreas cancer produces few symptoms specific to it until late in the disease, so it usually proceeds ‘silently’ and often is unnoticed until its late stages," says Tempero.
"And it’s one of the most biologically aggressive solid tumors," she notes. "For reasons that still evade us, it has an enormous potential to invade and spread very early," she adds.
Furthermore, says Tempero, less is known about what causes pancreas cancer than about what causes many other cancers. And scientists have yet to learn the reasons for pancreas cancer’s notorious ability to resist many chemotherapy drugs.
Group Sets Strategy for Progress
To work towards overcoming these difficulties, the Think Tank scientists outlined an aggressive plan that calls for the most intense focus on:
* Better understanding of the processes, conditions, and events that lead to the disease.
* More research to develop animal models of the disease.
* Identification of molecular targets for drugs of the type that leave normal cells largely unharmed while attacking cancer-related abnormalities. (Drugs of this type, such as Gleevec, recently have been approved for use against other cancers, and others such as C-225 and anti-angiogenic drugs are now in the advanced stages of clinical trials.)
* Development of a tissue bank to give scientists working against the disease access to pancreatic tumor tissue to aid in all these tasks.
Group Plans to Establish Tissue Bank
Because of the important role human pancreatic tumor tissue can play in aiding many kinds of research on the disease, and its scarcity, the scientists say establishment of a tumor tissue bank is an extremely high priority.
Tempero notes that only about 20% of all pancreas cancer patients undergo surgery to remove tumors, the source of most tissue for research, and that the tiny amounts of tissue removed via needle for diagnosis are insufficient to use for research, leading to a severe shortage of tissue for pancreas cancer research.
Tempero says patients can help push research forward by asking if there is a tissue bank to which their removed pancreatic tissue can be sent, and if so, request that it be done.
Tempero also notes that some progress has been made recently in treatments that may be able to significantly lengthen a person's survival, but that awareness and use of such treatments usually are found only in centers with considerable expertise in the disease.
Expert Calls Paper Important
"This paper highlights a bad situation, and sometimes if you wave a flag, people will move forward with funding and research to help solve such a problem," notes LaMar McGinnis, MD, medical consultant to the American Cancer Society (ACS).
McGinnis says the approach the researchers suggest is one that could be expected to lead to better-targeted therapies — biologic and genetic therapies and other new approaches with the potential to improve the outcome of many pancreatic cancer cases.
"The needs these researchers have pointed out are real, their plan is ambitious but reasonable, and their goals are ones the ACS certainly can support," says McGinnis.
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