Pancreatic cancer
Pancreatic cancer
Pancreatic cancer is a deadly disease. It has the highest mortality rate among all cancers and is the fifth-leading cause of cancer death in Australia. Nearly 4,000 Australians were diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2020 and more than 3,000 died. Although survival for many types of cancer has improved, pancreatic cancer has only marginally improved. The disease is extremely hard to treat because it is often not diagnosed until a late stage.
What does the pancreas do?
What are the risk factors of pancreatic cancer?
Pancreatic cancer diagnosis
Our pancreatic cancer research
While survival for many types of cancer has improved in the last 40 years, the high mortality and poor survival rates for pancreatic cancer have only marginally improved. Our scientists are studying how this deadly cancer develops to find new ways to save lives through earlier diagnoses and new treatments. They are doing this by identifying regulators of the immune system that drive pancreatic cancer, and thus serve as new biomarkers and therapeutic targets for immune-based treatments.
Exploiting Shared Cancer Antigens for Off-the-Shelf Immunotherapy in Pancreatic Cancer
This project involves testing a new type of vaccine that teaches your body’s defence cells—called immune cells—to spot and destroy cancer.
Current treatments involve tailoring a specific cancer vaccine for each individual patient which is quite time consuming and costly, but this project is taking an alternative approach. Instead of tailoring a shot for every patient’s tumour, they will hunt for signs that nearly all pancreatic cancers share.
“If we find one or two shared markers, we can make a single vaccine for lots of people. We’d produce it in big batches, store it on the shelf and ship it when needed—much faster and cheaper than a custom shot.” A/Prof Pouya Faridi.
Team | Associate Professor Pouya Faridi, Dr Gabriel Goncalves, Dr Dan Croagh
Next Generation PDT programme developing new non-invasive cancer treatments
There is a desperate need for improved and less invasive treatments for cancers.
Dr Daniel Garama and his research team have developed naturally derived Next Generation Photodynamic Therapy (NG-PDT) compounds that are able to target and kill tumour cells in melanoma, ovarian, lung, blood, prostate and pancreatic cancers, in both invitro and preclinical models, and also clinically in melanoma.
This collaborative Next Generation PDT Program at Hudson Institute, supported by RMW Cho, has led to the development of a next generation Photodynamic Therapy Photodynamic drug that uses far UV light and kills tumour cells via oxygen generation.
The next step is to move into clinical trial stages using these NG-PDT compounds with the aim of developing new non-invasive cancer treatment pathways for some of the deadliest cancers.
Team | Dr Daniel Garama, Lethica Low, Luhith Dimantha, Anurag Yadav, Dr Donald Murphy
Affiliates | Associate Professor Seb Marcuccio, Scott Carpenter, Michael Cho, Hon Cho, Alex Bennett
Pancreatic cancer news
Pancreatic cancer collaborators
Support for people with pancreatic cancer
Hudson Institute scientists cannot provide medical advice.
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