Pancreatic cancer is an elusive disease because in many cases it produces no symptoms.
As a result the five-year survival rate is around 10 percent.
If it spreads to other parts of the body that survival rate is cut to below three percent.
“It’s one of the scarier cancers because once you discover that a person has pancreatic cancer, it’s often too late because there are no symptoms,” explains postdoctoral researcher Rupsa Datta.
“The survival rate is so low because at that point, you can’t really do anything.”
Ms Datta and her colleagues have published new research in the journal Science Advances about how pancreatic cancer grows and spreads.
They have discovered that pancreatic cancer is able to enslave nearby non-cancer cells to provide them nutrients for growth.
This could allow for the development of targeted therapies that can prevent the cancers from growing.
Ms Datta, an Assistant Scientist at Skala lab used special imaging techniques to examine how the tumour behaves in a natural environment.
The pancreatic tumour cells are dependent on surrounding cells and the structural elements of the tissue, called the extracellular matrix, to spread.
The extracellular matrix is a network of nutrients, minerals, structural proteins and other cells such as immune cells.
One particular type of cell called pancreatic stellate cells play the role of supporting the organ in its intended function, but can also support cancers.
In order to study the cells with their advanced imaging techniques, the cells were suspended in an organoid model, an artificial environment that reproduces the environment of the pancreas.
This was done by cooperating with another lab, Vander Heiden lab, that was specialised in this field.
I’m hoping this paper will show the power of our technique,” Ms Datta said.
“Though, if more cancer labs adopted it, they would still need to collaborate with labs like ours with imaging expertise.
“But we love to collaborate!”
