Cell Rep: revealing the cause of rapid growth of malignant pancreatic cancer

October 20, 2019 / Biogen / - a new discovery on pancreatic cancer reveals how pancreatic cancer promotes its growth and may help explain how promising anticancer drugs work and which cancers they are ineffective against This finding may one day help doctors decide which treatment is most effective for patients, so that they can get the best results "Pancreatic cancer is a very difficult problem For a long time, this has been a very difficult problem "The survival rate of pancreatic cancer patients is very low compared to other tumors," said Dr David f kashatus, a researcher at the University of Virginia School of medicine and the UVA cancer center "We are really trying to understand biology so that scientists and drug developers can get more information when dealing with this disease Any progress we can make, no matter how small, will be an improvement of the status quo "Image source: cell rep's mystery of pancreatic cancer This new discovery represents the work of kashatus over the years In 2012, kashatus first proposed this research project in an interview at the University of Virginia It also helps answer an 80 year old mystery: why and how does cancer power itself through a much less efficient process of reconnecting cells? Scientists have previously noticed that in cancer caused by ras mutation, the shape of mitochondria, the energy source of cells, has changed strangely Kashatus wanted to know what happened and how it affected the growth of pancreatic cancer Kashatus found that when the mutated ras gene is activated, it causes mitosis This split supports the early transition to new fuels for cancer This is surprising because mitochondria suddenly play a very unusual role They are actually helping cancer develop But there is also good news: the process may prove to be a cancer weakness that doctors can use to help patients Kashatus found that blocking mitosis in tumor samples blocked tumor growth to a large extent As cancer cells grow, they gradually lose their mitochondrial function This is bad for cancer, and the lack of mitochondria represents another weakness doctors can exploit "Mitosis actually plays two different roles: on the one hand, it promotes the transformation of metabolism But it also promotes mitochondrial health, "kashatus said "The combination of these two substances promotes the growth of pancreatic tumors So I think it's valuable in terms of treatment But in general, it also teaches us how to grow pancreatic tumors "This finding may also help explain how several drugs work in development and help doctors understand which patients will benefit," said kashatus of the Department of Microbiology, immunology and cancer biology at the University of Virginia "Inhibiting [mitosis in cancer cells] will be a good goal for us in the future However, the drugs for this process are still in the early stage of development, so they can not be put into clinical use soon But this study does help us understand how other drugs work in this process, so we can better understand which patients may benefit and which patients may not "Reference: sarbajeet nagdas et al, drp1 promotes KRAS driven metallic changes to drive pancreatic tumor growth, cell reports (2019) Doi: 10.1016/j.celrep.2019.07.031