A medical breakthrough in the study of pancreatic cancer could hold the key to more effective treatments, a Queensland researcher says.
The study identified and mapped the genetic changes that drive the formation of the cancer’s variations.
Researchers from Brisbane and the United Kingdom have discovered four previously unknown subtypes of the disease.
Dr Nicola Waddell from the QIMR Berghofer Medical Research Institute said the discovery would allow practitioners to target the subtypes individually.
“Pancreatic cancer – the therapies and the ways patients are managed – haven’t really improved in the last few decades,” she said.
“This really is one of the first studies that will hopefully help improve the outcome for some patients of this particular subtype of pancreatic cancer.”
Dr Waddell said the breakthrough meant doctors would be able to determine which chemotherapy drug a patient should get based on their cancer’s genome.
“By sub-dividing the pancreatic patients into four groups, it gives us a better chance to hone in and give them a better treatment, a more personalised treatment,” she said.
“In one of the groups, we could already identify a specific treatment that that group of patients was responding to better.”
Pancreatic cancer survival rate very low
She said statistics of pancreatic cancer showed most people succumbed to it within the first six months and the five-year survival rate was very low.
Dr Waddell said scientists explored the genetic makeup of 100 tumours.
“We compared that to normal cells from the same person in each case,” she said.
“The idea is we’re looking for differences in the tumour so we can, one, determine how the tumour arose in the first place, and two, find how we can treat it.
“What we discovered is that there’s four subtypes, which hasn’t been previously known before.”
She said at the moment a person with pancreatic cancer would be treated in quite a uniform manner.
“Finding these four groups shows that they need to be treated differently,” she said.
“We’re looking at the genetic makeup of how the tumours are different from the normal – what mutations have developed over time to create these subtypes.
“The particular subtype [that we’ve tested] that responds particularly well to therapy – we’ve termed it an unstable subtype – because the genomes are massively rearranged.
“This information is now being used to design newer clinical trials, and to really target that group of patients who showed that this treatment is better for their group of patients.”
She said the overriding theme of this kind of approach was known as “personalised medicine”.
“Taking a person’s tumour, treating it as an individual person, performing the sequence analysis, and then selecting a therapy based on their genome profile,” she said.