Could combining therapies supercharge pancreatic cancer treatment?
Cancer types:
Pancreatic cancer
Project period:
–
Research institute:
Fima Fundación Para la Investigación Médica Aplicada
Award amount:
£218,850
Location:
Spain
Targeted treatments are a relatively new way to treat cancer that work by disrupting how cancer cells grow and spread. Dr Silvestre Vicent and his team in Spain are investigating if combining a particular targeted therapy with another powerful type of cancer treatment could make them more effective for more people with pancreatic cancer.
Why is this research needed?
Pancreatic cancer can be very hard to detect, and difficult to treat. Sadly, survival from the disease has not really improved over the last 50 years. This is partly because pancreatic cancer can often become resistant to the few treatments available, and then come back.
‘KRAS inhibitors’ are a new type of targeted treatment that look set to change the way we treat pancreatic cancer. But they do not work for all people, and tumours can eventually come back. So Dr Vincent and his team are now searching for a way to boost the effectiveness of KRAS inhibitors.
The team have identified another drug which works in a different way to KRAS inhibitors, and which could work in combination to help treatment become much more effective. Dr Vincent is using Curestarter funding to investigate this in more detail. This work has the potential to help the thousands of patients who develop pancreatic cancer every year worldwide.
I would like to thank Curestarters for their generosity and strong belief that cancer can be defeated through discovery research. As I recently said to my research group, this funding is a clear example of the trust that Curestarters have on our work and, therefore, we have a responsibility to use this funding wisely to develop a strong project which, eventually, can get our science close the patients’ bedside. That will not only be our hope but also our daily commitment.
What is the science behind this project?
KRAS inhibitors work by sticking to a protein called KRAS inside cancer cells. This protein normally acts as a finely tuned switch for the cell, helping to regulate many essential molecular functions. But when KRAS inhibitors stick to KRAS, they stop this switch from working and the cell grows weaker and more vulnerable.
Dr Vicent and his team have found that treating cancer cells with KRAS inhibitors could also lead to another vital weakness in cancer cells. Importantly, this weakness could then be targeted by a second drug. This second drug currently only works for a few people with a very specific kind of pancreatic cancer. But when combined with KRAS inhibitors, the treatment could work for more people.
Dr Vicent and his team believe that combining both treatments together will ‘supercharge’ their effectiveness in pancreatic cancer, and that together, they could become a powerful treatment option for many more people with the disease. The team are using Curestarter funding to investigate this new combination in cancer cells and in mice to find out if this does lead to improved results.
What difference could this project make to patients in the future?
The team plan to generate important data that can be used to support further studies in patients. And as both of these treatments are already licensed for use in cancer patients, this project has the potential to begin studies in patients very quickly.
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