health

Promising
Study

Discover

Israeli researchers hope to develop a
nanoparticle to fi ght pancreatic cancer.

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Tel Aviv University study that
set out to find what makes
some pancreatic cancer
patients more likely to survive the
deadly disease than others hopes to
use the results to develop an effec-
tive cocktail of drugs to fight the
aggressive cancer as well as other
types, researchers said.
The study, which was pub-
lished recently in Nature
Communications, was led by Prof.
Ronit Satchi-Fainaro, chair of
the Department of Physiology and
Pharmacology at TAU’s Sackler
Faculty of Medicine.
Pancreatic cancer is among the
most aggressive cancers known
today. The overwhelming majority of
pancreatic cancer patients succumb
within a year of diagnosis.
“Despite all the treatments afford-
ed by modern medicine, some 75
percent of all pancreatic cancer
patients die within 12 months of
diagnosis, including many who die
within just a few months,” Satchi-
Fainaro said.

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January 25 • 2018

jn

“But around 7 percent of those
diagnosed will survive more than
five years. We sought to examine
what distinguishes the survivors
from the rest of the patients,” she
said. “We thought that if we could
understand how some people live
several years with this most aggres-
sive disease, we might be able to
develop a new therapeutic strategy.”
The research team examined pan-
creatic cancer cells and discovered
an inverse correlation between a
gene that promotes the develop-
ment of cancer and a cancer sup-
pressor. The levels of miR-34a, a
tumor suppressant, were low in pan-
creatic cancer mouse models and
human cell models, while the levels
of PLK1, a known oncogene that
boosts development of the cancer
cells, were high. However, patients
who beat the odds — the so-called
long-term survivors — had a com-
pletely opposite genetic makeup;
they had higher levels of the tumor
suppressant and lower levels of the
PLK1 gene.