Pancreatic cancer is – you guessed it – cancer of the pancreas. This is the small organ just behind the stomach that, amongst other things, releases enzymes to help you digest food as well as hormones to regulate your blood sugar.
Cancer in this organ is classically hard to detect. Unless you have a family history and are getting regularly screened for it, pancreatic cancer is often not caught until it is in its later stages. (1, 2, 6) This, coupled with the cancer’s relative unresponsiveness to traditional treatment methods, makes a patient’s outlook rather grim: The five-year survival rate sits at a mere 6%.
Current treatment options include surgery, chemotherapy, radiation, or a combination of these, but at the late stage that pancreatic cancer is usually found, these are often ineffective. (1, 2, 6)
Researchers at Tel Aviv University have made an exciting new discovery that has the potential to save thousands of lives. The potential answer lies in a small molecule that has shown to have the power to cause pancreatic cancer cells to self-destruct.
This molecule, called PJ34, successfully reduced the number of cancer cells by 90% in a xenographic study. (3, 5)
Scientists took human pancreatic cancer cells and transplanted them into immunocompromised mice. The mice then received an injection of PJ34 for 14-days straight. One month later, the number of cancer cells were reduced to almost none, with one mouse’s tumors disappearing completely. (3, 4, 5)
This article was provided by MSN
