Can a revolutionary new immunotherapy fight pancreatic cancer?

Background

In Australia, around 3,300 people are diagnosed with pancreatic cancer each year. This devastating cancer carries one of the lowest survival rates. Only 7% of people diagnosed with pancreatic cancer will survive for five years or longer – a rate that has changed very little in recent decades.

The research

Professor Rasko and his team are trialling a potential new treatment for pancreatic cancer known as CAR T-cell immunotherapy. This type of treatment involves taking a patient’s own immune cells, growing them in a highly specialised clinical laboratory, reprogramming them to attack only cancer cells, and then returning them to the patient. Once inside the body these CAR T-cells are designed to seek out pancreatic cancer cells and multiply to destroy them using the body’s own immune mechanisms.

CAR T-cell immunotherapy has shown unprecedented success in patients with advanced acute lymphoblastic leukaemia. Around 80% of patients respond to treatment and remain disease-free after a single injection of the reprogrammed cells.

Professor Rasko’s project is the first in Australia to test this treatment approach in a solid tumour. This clinical trial will assess the tumour-fighting capacity of these cells against pancreatic cancer while international collaborators focus on using the same technology in other cancers.