Grant: Project Grant

Pancreatic cancer is one of the deadliest cancers. Most patients are diagnosed when the tumour is too big or has spread to other organs, so it can no longer be removed by surgery. The only alternative is to treat the tumour with chemotherapy. To date, there are two main combinations of chemotherapy (FOLFIRINOX and GEM-Pac) and patients are assigned to one of these treatments based on clinical factors. However, our group has shown that the DNA sequence and RNA expression of the tumour has an impact on whether the patient responds to FOLFIRINOX, and preliminary data has shown that 3-D in vitro cultures of the patient tumour cells may further improve our ability to predict how patients respond to chemotherapy. This grant proposal looks to validate and expand this 3-D model system in a larger number of patients. If we are successful, we will be able to establish a platform to assign a patient to a specific chemotherapy or switch their treatment before chemotherapy starts to fail. We will also use this platform to screen for newer, targeted drugs for pancreatic cancer to increase the number of treatment options available for patients. Our group has recently been funded to perform a clinical trial to compare FOLFIRNOX versus GEM-Pac, and the study from this proposal will build on and add value to this clinical trial. The proposed funding will finance the drug testing studies and the personnel to perform the experiments. The project has a strong impact on improving therapy for patients with pancreatic cancer as we will create a platform that will help clinicians to select drugs with a higher chance of success, improving survival and quality of life.