A new technique that can help fight deadly and hard-to-treat pancreatic cancer has been developed by researchers at UCLA's Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center.

The results of the study are published online in the journal ACS Nano and will be featured in the November 2013 print issue.
Pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma, or pancreatic cancer, is a deadly disease that is nearly impossible to detect until it is in the advanced stage. Treatment options are limited and have low success rates. The need for innovative and improved treatment of pancreatic cancer cannot be overstated, the researchers said, as a pancreatic cancer diagnosis has often been synonymous with a death sentence.
Pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma tumors are made up of cancer cells that are surrounded by other structural elements called stroma. The stroma can be made of many substances, including connective tissue and pericyte cells, which block standard chemotherapy drugs in tumor blood vessels from efficiently reaching the cancer cells, reducing the effectiveness of treatment.
The dual-wave nanotherapy method employed by Nel and Meng uses two different kinds of nanoparticles injected intravenously in a rapid succession. The first wave of nanoparticles carries a substance that removes the pericytes' vascular gates, opening up access to the pancreatic cancer cells; the second wave carries the chemotherapy drug that kills the cancer cells.
Nel and Meng, along with colleagues Dr. Jeffrey Zink, a UCLA professor of chemistry and biochemistry, and Dr. Jeffrey Brinker, a University of New Mexico professor of chemical and nuclear engineering, sought to place chemotherapy drugs into nanoparticles that could more directly target pancreatic cancer cells, but they first needed to find a way to get those nanoparticles through the sites of vascular obstruction caused by pericytes, which restrict access to the cancer cells.
Advertisements
To test this nanotherapy, the researchers used immuno-compromised mice in which they grew human pancreatic tumors called xenografts under the skin. With the two-wave method, the xenograft tumors had a significantly higher rate of shrinkage than tumors exposed only to chemotherapy given as a free drug or carried in nanoparticles without first-wave treatment.
Advertisements
Source-Eurekalert