According to Pancreatic Cancer Action Network, pancreatic cancer is one of the deadliest types of cancer in the United States. It has a very low survival rate of less than 7% with around 73% of the diagnosed patients dying in their first year alone.
One of the biggest challenges of pancreatic cancer is detection. Because of the location of the pancreas, which is located in the deeper part of the abdominal cavity, and the vague symptoms like abdominal pain, which can be attributed to other kinds of illnesses, patients are often in their late stages when they are diagnosed.
Thus, the new discovery of a team of researchers is significant.
A group of researchers from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute including Dr. Brian Wolpin and Dr. Matthew Vander, discovered that an increase in certain types of amino acid chain may pave the way for the early detection of the disease and may even be one day help create the right prompt screening test.
The study, which was later published in Nature Medicine, involves around 1,500 participants, some of whom developed pancreatic cancer. Doctors drew blood samples, which will then later analyzed for metabolites. Overall, they assessed no less than 100 of them.
Comparing these amino acid chains between cancer patients and those who did not develop the disease, they realized that these chains were more prominent during the early years prior to the diagnosis of the cancer patients. This then led the researchers to hypothesize that the increase of the amino acids may be because of the development of the tumor.
With these findings, the researchers hope that doctors may be able to treat pancreatic cancer more successfully because of early detection.
This isn't the first attempt to find and create a screening test for early detection of pancreatic cancer. In 2012, a teen named Jack Andraka developed a simple screening method by analyzing certain proteins. It later won him a $75,000 and a Gordon Moore Award.
