Pancreatic cancer is among the deadliest of cancers, affecting many people a year and having an extremely low survival rate. Pancreatic cancer is the most aggressive cancer and there are few palliative treatments. Using a new two-pronged attack, researchers were able to destroy deadly pancreatic cancer cells in the test tube and in lab animals.
The work was led by Dr. Paul B. Fisher, a professor of clinical pathology at Columbia. Researchers were interested in using a tumor-stopping protein from a newly discovered gene known as mda-7, which has been found effective in destroying other types of cancer cells. This killed the pancreatic cancer cells in the lab after a few days.The observations are very provocative and with a little tweaking, may lead to an effective therapy for a devastating and aggressive disease.
