Funded in partnership with Miami Dolphins Foundation
Pancreatic cancer is a really bad disease that’s hard to treat. Even though treatments like immunotherapy have helped with other cancers, they haven’t worked well for pancreatic cancer. Some people get pancreatic cancer because of a problem gene passed down in their family, like BRCA. We tried treating these people with a mix of immunotherapy drugs, and it worked amazingly well for a few. Their cancer completely went away, and they stayed cancer-free for over 5 years. Now, we’re trying to figure out why it worked for some and not others. We are doing some lab experiments in mice with pancreatic cancer and it seems like something in the cancer cells called STING might be the main reason why this treatment is working. We want to study more tumors from people with pancreatic cancer and the BRCA gene problem to confirm this. Also, we plan to do more tests on mice to see if we can make STING work better in those that don’t respond to treatment at first. If these tests work, it could help create a new treatment for pancreatic cancer in the future.
