There's a silver lining in the fight against pancreatic cancer, and it could be a standard test.
Pancreatic cancer continues to be one of the cancers difficult to treat. In the United States, it's expected that around 48,000 will be diagnosed with it. However, 40,000 of them will also die.
One of the reasons is that pancreatic cancer is not easy to diagnose. While the survival rate of stage 1 cancer is 14%, most of the cases are discovered when the disease is already advanced and cancer may have already spread to the nearby vital organs such as the liver. When this happens, the rate of survival can drop by as much as 1%.
The pancreas, the organ that produces insulin, is quite hidden, so it's not conveniently detected by ultrasounds and scans. But scientists have discovered that the tumors can actually create a certain protein, which can be released into the bloodstream.
The team, led by Dr. Raghu Kalluri, believes that this is what the community has been waiting for. By such discovery, it could mean that the cancer has the potential of being detected through a blood test. Kalluri, who currently works in MD Anderson Center as the head of its cancer biology division, explains how they came across the protein.
The team was initially looking for something else: vesicles that are produced by all types of cells. If they could acquire them, they could then compare the genetic or even DNA composition of malignant and normal cells. They obtained the samples from at least 30 patients with breast cancer and about 245 pancreatic cancer patients.
Based on their analyses, cancer cells tend to excrete high levels of a protein known as GPC1. However, this protein is the most consistent among pancreatic cancer patients. In fact, it's abnormally high in all of its samples.
Experts including Kalluri's team are aware that more need to be done, but this is indeed a research that's worth exploring soon.