MENUU-M researchers get $1.5M grant to develop customized pancreatic cancer treatment
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ANN ARBOR, Mich. — One day, a pancreatic cancer patient will provide a blood sample and doctors will recommend treatments designed to target all the harmful cell’s in the individual’s tumor. This is the vision of pancreatic cancer researchers at the University of Michigan Rogel Cancer Center.
A new grant worth $1.5 million from the Lustgarten Foundation will help them get there.
The interdisciplinary team of researchers is using microfluidic technology to isolate circulating tumor cells in patients with pancreatic cancer. Expanding those cells in three dimensions will allow researchers to see the tumor behaving as it does within a person. The researchers will then employ novel strategies to develop the optimal combination of drugs designed to target an individual patient’s tumor cells and shut down the pathways involved in fueling the cancer.
The goal is to use a blood sample to identify the best treatment regimen to eradicate all harmful cancer cells within a person’s tumor.
“If this approach is successful, it would be a major advance in developing more effective treatments for individual patients with pancreatic cancer from a blood sample. It also has potential as a strategy to treat patients with other highly metastatic cancer types,” says Diane Simeone, M.D., the principal investigator of the study.
“This project is a great example of what we can accomplish with an inter-disciplinary approach, bringing scientists with different areas of expertise together to tackle a complex problem,” Simeone says.
Other members of the research team at the University of Michigan include Joerg Lahann, Ph.D., director of the Biointerfaces Institute; Sunitha Nagrath, Ph.D., assistant professor of chemical engineering; and Andrew Rhim, M.D., assistant professor of gastroenterology.
Pancreatic cancer is one of the most aggressive and lethal types of cancer. About 46,400 Americans will be diagnosed with pancreatic cancer this year, and more than 39,000 will die of the disease. It is often detected in advanced stages, but even among patients with early stage disease, fewer than a third survive. Pancreatic cancer is expected to become the second-leading cause of cancer death in the United States by 2030.