Use of a preclinical model of pancreas cancer to identify potential candidates for rapalogue therapy

The oft-repeated statistics are dismal: pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDA) has only a 6% 5-year survival rate that has not changed significantly in 30 years and the vast majority of PDA patients perish within 6 months of diagnosis. Several possible reasons contribute to these grim results. PDA is difficult to detect, it is recalcitrant to most targeted treatments and conventional therapies only have a modest effect on survival. Compared with other cancers, PDA was revealed to be remarkably genetically homogenous with 95% or more of PDA harbouring oncogenic mutations in the Kras gene,1 generating hope that finding effective ways of interrupting Kras signalling would increase survival for PDA patients. However, Kras-targeted therapies have proven elusive thus far, leaving its downstream effectors as the most obvious potential targets. The true genetic heterogeneity of PDA has just begun to be appreciated2 3 within a background of the...
Source: Gut - Category: Gastroenterology Authors: Tags: Commentary Source Type: research