Submitted by giuliomagnifico t3_y9yjbw in science
It’s one of the most aggressive cancers, iirc. This research is a huge deal. So many people go from diagnosis to death in weeks.
My mom was lucky she survived for 3 years. I hate this cancer so much. I gave my moms final dose an it sucks going bed with that every night.
Wow that sounds like torture.
Cancer was the easy part. My Holocaust arrived with terminal agitation.
Restless. Screaming. Too afraid to die.
Awake w her in her bedroom like that for days. It was “too emotional” for the rest of my family. Morphine every 2 hrs. No sleep.
Dad died 4 months later.
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It's not aggressive so much as it is really hard to detect without specialised tests. Pancreatic cancer tends to grow for years before symptoms show, and by then it is too late.
I went through something similar last year. My mom died in her sleep without warning; completely unexpectedly. Her apartment was shared with her SO who had died six months previously. It was filled with things that were from the past and things that were forward looking. New deliveries just arrived. It wasn’t an experience you can describe. If your dad, you, or someone else in your family has had trouble processing that experience, you are not alone.
Pancreatic cancer death rates are practically unchanged in the last 20 years… it’s probable one of the hardest cancers to treat, aggressive and with an overall survival rate of 5% at 5 years. If you look at other cancers you will see the outlook is way better now, not pancreas. Anyway I hope this goes into clinical trials soon, but the fact remains that we have tried a lot in pancreatic cancer without a lot of luck.
They sell mice and rats with various expected age of getting cancer on average. Tons of selective breeding to get there.
That expected percentage of animals getting cancer at whatever age is the baseline they test these things on.
And like the other person said: mice and rats almost all get cancer eventually.
In the USA, progress has been made in increasing the 5 year survival rate for all stages and forms of pancreatic cancer. In 2002 the 5 year survival rate was approximately 5.5% and in 2022 the rate is 11.5%. That is a doubling of the rate. More progress has been made in the past two decades then several prior decades combined due to drug development, increased funding by the US Federal Government and private sector for pancreatic cancer research, clinical trials, precision medicine and targeted therapy.
Can’t wait to never hear about this again.
Just like every cancer headline I’ve ever read
Cancer deaths have dropped almost 30% in the last 20 years.
CAR-T was once a headline, now is an incredible tool to fight hemotological malignancies that are highly treatment resistant.
PD-1 inhibitors were once a headline, now have changed the face of melanoma therapy.
Many oncology approaches don't work, some do.
If they come back in a couple of years saying they are ready for use, will you even remember this post?
How many of these "never hear about again" is just you not remembering something from years ago?
I don't know, this one sounds very close to other techniques that are effective for extending life. My understanding is implanting pellets around tumors is a used method that is gaining some steam and this seems like a logical progression from there.
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That said this wouldn't do much(anything) for distant metastasis, so even if we do hear about it again and it does become widely used and it is as effective as they think it could be, it still means the patient dies of pancreatic cancer, just you know, later on when the tumors are too numerous to treat.
I envision a future where we can functionalize nano-particles with molecules which make them selectively taken up by cancerous tissue. These nanoparticles could be of a composition such that they heat up a lot upon NIR radiation, meaning non-invasive, selective zapping of cancerous cells. That's far out though I think
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That's how I feel about these exact same posts word for word.
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Anything to reduce the number of whipples
I hope this research progresses and saves lives. Pancreatic cancer is devastating. My mother passed two weeks after we found out. She couldn't be saved but I hope other people don't have to go through so much suffering.
Probably a common question but do they give the mice cancer?
Looks like they can inject them with a number of chemicals, or use genetic engineering:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6995380/
Rat: Wistar and Lewis rats are injected intraperitoneally with azaserine to induce acinar cell carcinoma of the pancreas, with liver, lung and lymph node metastasis 6, 7. However, the lesions in this model lack a typical duct-like structure and of ten occur alongside tumors of other organs (mammary, liver, kidney). The chemicals 4-hydroxyaminoquinoline-1-oxide 8, nafenopin 9, clofibrate 10, N -(N-methyl-N-nitrosamide)-L-ornithine 11 and different N-nitro compounds 7 can induce acinar cell lesions without a duct-like structure. Vesselinovitch et al. found that topical benzopyrene can induce adenocarcinoma in rats. They implanted dimethylbenzanthracene crystal powder into the pancreas of Sprague-Dawley rats, and approximately 80% of them developed spindle cell sarcoma and poorly differentiated adenocarcinoma. Other researchers using this method have found ductal cell proliferation, tubular adenocarcinoma, acinic cell carcinoma, fibrosarcoma, and invasive ductal adenocarcinoma.
Thank you so much for the answer
Do studies ever focus on those 20% of mice that don’t develop cancers after injections and why that might be?
Yes this is what they do. Each method has its own advantages and disadvantages regarding how representative it is to human disease
All rats pretty much die of cancer, iirc, if you just wait 2-3 years. But yeah, I wonder if they expose them to something that increases the likelihood of specific cancers.
They will also sometimes implant tumor cells, which is called a xenograph
We are getting really good and saving mice!
But seriously, hopefully something like this can move into human trials quickly.
Mouse model. Dont get your hopes up just yet.
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Sounds similar to the radioactive seed/proton therapy that’s been very successful for prostate cancer!
I do not see any fundamental progress here. Using a radioactive implant may eliminate the primary tumor - just like a surgical resection. Unfortunately, the majority of patients suffer a recurrence even after R0 resection (no tumor cells in the resection margins) because the primary tumor has already spread before the resection. The same applies to the local insertion of an implant. A game changer would be a targeted systemic therapy (such as trastuzumab for HER2+ breast cancer). However, we are still far away from this due to the lack of possible targets.
There's a lot for research into targeted anti-cancer drugs for pancreatic cancer. Lutathera for example treats pancreatic neuroendocrine tumors.
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Man i hate that we use mice like this . But damn they have pioneered so much benefits for us as humans . I personally dont use mouse traps because where i live the average house mouse is a very low risk of giving you anything . And most of the time its only one lone mouse and weev never had an issue with more then one at a time . But i feel bad that they have suck a bad wrap and people see them as the biggest menace to society . We hate them yet their built so much like us that we study our own advances of medicine on them as a baseline . I love mice (:
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newlypeaceful t1_it9ptpu wrote
My uncle passed away five weeks after his pancreatic cancer diagnosis. His house was full of things he was preparing for the next stage of his life that my dad had to clean out after his passing. I hope someday no one has to go through the pain and grief he and my family did.