Researchers have made a stem cell discovery that may help treat pancreatic cancer -- one of the deadliest forms of the disease. University of Michigan scientists have found cancer stem cells in pancreatic tumors that appear to drive cell tumor growth and could lead to the development of drugs to target and kill these cells.
Pancreatic cancer kills 97 percent of people diagnosed with the disease within five years. Half of all diagnosed patients die within six months of diagnosis, and this cancer -- that spreads quickly and is rarely detected at an early state -- kills 33,000 each year in the United States alone. So any improvement in the study of this disease is a true gift.
"The clinical implications of this work are significant," said Dr. Diane Simeone, director of the Gastrointestinal Oncology Program at the University of Michigan Comprehensive Cancer Centre and lead author of the study, published in the journal Cancer Research.
"We've made baby steps in improving the survival in these patients -- on the order of a few months (longer to live) -- over the past decade or so. But we really haven't had a major breakthrough in coming up with something that has the potential to provide a cure," she said.
Simeone says killing these cancer stem cells is like pulling out the root of a weed. And she says the best way to pull out the root is to target these stem cells instead of the traditional approach of shrinking tumors by killing as many cells as possible -- an approach that may be flawed because cancer stem cells tend to resist standard therapies.
