Pancreatic cancer: tackling the tumour by targeting its surroundings
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With fewer than 5 percent of sufferers surviving beyond five years of diagnosis, pancreatic cancer is one of the most lethal of all cancers. Late diagnosis is one reason for these statistics, but so is the aggressive nature of the tumour and its resistance to the drugs used during chemotherapy.
An array of chemotherapy drugs and molecular targeted therapies have succeeded in slowing or stopping tumour growth in cell culture and mouse experiments, but they have failed to have any impact in patients with pancreatic cancer taking part in clinical trials.
The EPC-TM-NET ('Targeting the tumour microenvironment to improve pancreatic cancer prognosis') project is tackling the disease from a different angle. Instead of focusing on the tumour itself, the team is using its EUR 3 million grant from the EU's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7) to study the microenvironment surrounding the tumour. Recent research has shown that a tumour's microenvironment, including blood vessels, connective tissue and a variety of other cells, play a major role keeping tumour cells under control.