Today, pancreatic cancer (pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma) continues to be a fatal disease, with a 5-year survival of less than 10% of patients. The most recent studies foresee that its incidence will increase in the coming years, which would become the second cause of death in 2030, behind lung tumors.
Why is pancreatic cancer so deadly?
The high mortality rate of this disease is mainly due to the fact that its symptoms are very diffuse, so they go unnoticed, and there are also no biomarkers that allow early diagnosis of the tumor. This often causes the disease to be diagnosed in very advanced stages.
In this new installment of Science in the Street we have met Laura Gutiérrez, who works at the Cancer Research Center of the University of Salamanca. His team aims precisely to find new ways to detect tumors early and develop personalized treatments that improve current therapies.
“It is necessary to implement new efficient diagnostic procedures for the identification of pancreatic cancer in the earliest stages of the disease,” he explains. “In addition, it is a challenge at the therapeutic level, since the few treatment protocols used so far do not translate into a better long-term prognosis , largely due to the high rate of resistance of the tumor to them. This implies that many patients undergo extensive therapeutic regimens with high cytotoxicity and limited efficiency, which makes the need to develop new therapeutic approaches or improve current ones is imperative ”.
One of the lines in which they work focuses on developing a protocol to detect tumor cells through a blood sample, which would allow detecting the disease in its early stages. According to the researcher, the future of the fight against cancer is promising, and solutions will come from the hand of advances in personalized medicine, which will allow choosing the right treatment for each person based on their physical condition.
Laura Gutiérrez’s work is funded through the “Stop brain drain” initiative funded by ROCHE FARMA, SA in order to create and retain research tissue, in a collaboration agreement for the promotion and dissemination of biomedical research in Castilla y León with the Salamanca Biomedical Research Institute (IBSAL).
Science on the Street is a project carried out in collaboration with the Scientific Culture Unit of the University of Salamanca . Our goal is to get scientists out of the lab and into the outside world so they can tell us what they do. We will be with them in the bar, in the gym, in the pool … even in an airport!
