We are sharing a very interesting Breakthrough Cancer Research Update from Dr. Pat Forde and his team.

Pancreatic cancer is one of the deadliest types of cancers and has one of the worst survival rates of all cancers and it known to become resistant to standard chemotherapy regimens. In this project we wanted to establish a new treatment protocol to improve outcomes for pancreatic cancer.

Electroporation has been shown to increase the uptake of chemotherapy drugs in tumours. This treatment uses a series of short electric pulses to create reversible holes. The electric pulses are optimised to only target cancer cells. These reversible holes allow efficient entry of chemotherapy to enter the cancer cell. This treatment has proven to be a very effective for skin-based tumours.

In our Breakthrough Cancer Research funded project we wanted to expand this electroporation treatment and make it a treatment option for pancreatic cancer.

We used clinically available metabolic modulators. These modulators are designed to help to slow down the growth of tumours and exposes the chemotherapy drug’s activity site within the cancer.

We combined these clinically available metabolic modulators with the electroporation treatment. We observed that this combination worked well, and we have identified potential candidate metabolic modulators that can sensitise pancreatic cancer to electroporation treatment.

This work is still at an early stage, but we hope to develop and validate this combination treatment as a potential new treatment option for pancreatic cancer.


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