Grant: Project Grant

Pancreatic cancer is a deadly disease. Currently patients with this disease are treated with chemotherapy and surgery if possible. For most patients however, their tumours regrow at some point after the initial chemotherapy. This occurs because some tumours cells in the original tumour are resistant to the chemotherapy and remain alive after treatment providing a seed for a new tumour to regrow. The effectiveness of a therapy therefore depends on both how many tumour cells a treatment initially kills and how quickly any surviving cells can regrow and form a new tumour. Different treatment schedules (amount of drug and frequency of treatments) and signals from the tumour environment impact both how well a cell can survive a therapy and how quickly it can re-grow to form a new tumour. This project proposes to explore how different drug treatments and signals from the environment change tumour cell response to therapy (initial killing and potential for tumour cell re-growth). This study will provide a basis to design new therapies for pancreatic cancer using specific combinations of drugs that maximise the number of tumour cells initially killed and minimise the capacity of any remaining tumour cells to re-grow into new tumours.