Investigating new ways to treat advanced pancreatic cancer effectively

The challenge

There are currently limited treatment options available for advanced pancreatic cancer, where the disease has spread outside of the pancreas. Chemotherapy can help slow down the growth of the cancer, shrink the tumour and relieve symptoms, but it doesn’t generally cure pancreatic cancer, especially when the disease is at an advanced stage. There is an urgent need to develop new and more effective treatment options for advanced pancreatic cancer.

Pancreatic cancer cells do not grow in isolation. Instead, they are part of a much larger environment which, as well as cancer cells, also includes high numbers of non-cancerous cells, including structural cells and immune system cells. These cells can influence how the cancer cells grow and change over time and also how they behave in response to treatment. These non-cancerous cells are also thought to play a role in treatment resistance, which occurs when cancer cells stop responding to treatments such as chemotherapy.

In this project, the research team will investigate why current treatments are ineffective in advanced pancreatic cancer, and how immune cells in the cancer environment contribute to treatment resistance.

The project

Dr Nobis will use a cutting-edge imaging technique called intravital microscopy to monitor pancreatic cancer cells that have spread from the pancreas to the lungs and liver. This method allows researchers to study cells and tissues at the microscopic level in their natural environment, and observe how they function and interact with each other in real time.

The research team will study how immune cells and other non-cancerous cells in the environment surrounding the tumour interact with cancer cells, and how this changes in response to treatments including chemotherapy and targeted therapies such as PARP inhibitors. They will also investigate whether immune cells have the ability to influence the development of treatment resistance. In particular, they will focus on a type of immune cell called neutrophils, as these are thought to play a big role in treatment resistance. Dr Nobis and his team will block the activity of neutrophils and test whether this improves the effectiveness of different types of treatments.

The hope

The research team hope that this project will shed new light on how pancreatic cancer cells behave in the lung and liver, how they interact with other cells and how they evade or become resistant to pancreatic cancer treatments. They hope that their findings could ultimately help improve treatment options for patients with advanced pancreatic cancer.