Immunotherapy Offers New Hope for Fighting Pancreatic Cancer

“We are making advancements in pancreatic cancer over the last five to ten years, however the advancements have come out slowly. This is because unfortunately many drugs that have been tried when adding to chemotherapy regimens just haven't made a significant impact in improving survival for these patients,” says Dr. Allyson Ocean, Medical Oncologist at Weill Cornell Medicine and NewYork-Presbyterian.

“So we need to find more drugs that will show more efficacy with this disease,” Dr. Ocean continues. “The Parker institute is unique because it’s using philanthropy to connect scientists and I think it happens quicker in this setting than with industry funding.”

The pancreas is an organ in the belly. Each year in the United States, about 53,000 patients get pancreatic cancer. Only about 20% of individuals will actually be candidates for surgery. About 80% of those patients have advanced pancreatic cancer which means the cancer has either spread beyond the pancreas, or into other organs like the liver. For these patients, the cancer can’t be cleanly removed with surgery.

Immunotherapy for pancreatic cancer hasn’t historically worked that well. “Up until now, immunotherapy hasn't had a big role,” says Dr. Ocean. “Now this study is combining two immunotherapy drugs with frontline standard chemotherapy, and we're seeing response rates that are significantly better than what was published with other chemotherapies alone.”

But in this study, the treatment seems to be working for long periods of time (for pancreatic cancer). “The other important takeaway of the trial is that many of the patients that did get a response, the response lasted for a very long time so that's important, too,” says Dr. Ocean. “I think it was ten months or more, which is a long time in this disease, when only 20% of people are alive at one year after diagnosis of advanced pancreatic cancer. So if they are on one drug that they are getting a durable response from for ten months, then that’s very good.”

And after patients have received this treatment, they may still be able to receive other treatments as well. “If this is the first regimen that people are getting and it’s already putting them in a survival of almost a year,” , if the disease decides to go again, there are still a lot of tools they haven't used yet,” Dr. Ocean says. “So it could change the number of people alive for one year, or two or five years even potentially.”

Dr. Ocean Co-Founded Let’s Win, a resource for information about pancreatic cancer. Dr. Robert Vonderheide, lead investigator on these studies, serves on the board of Let’s Win.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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