Pancreatic cancer is said to be one of the deadliest types of cancer with median survival of 3 – 6 months due to late diagnosis. When the cancer is found early, it can be operable, however patients are usually diagnosed with stage III or IV pancreatic cancer. In such cases, chemotherapy is used to prolong survival, gemcitabine being the most commonly used chemotherapeutic, followed by bleomycin and cisplatin. Rarely it is treated with radiotherapy, where radiation is used to induce mutations that lead to apoptosis. Treatment of pancreatic adenocarcinoma is difficult due to thick tumor microenvironment. Immune checkpoint inhibitors also inhibit the cytotoxic properties of lymphocytes T. Therefore, new treatment methods are focused on immunotherapy. Human monoclonal antibodies produced in CHO cell lines, that inhibit immune checkpoints, such as PD-L1, CTLA-4 and VISTA, are not showing much success by themselves, but different combinatorial therapies are more promising. Specifically, vaccines with dendritic cells exposed to tumor antigens prolong combined with chemotherapy prolong life for a full year, while the combination with immune checkpoint inhibitors only prolongs survival for 6 months. CAR T therapy is not well developed yet, however electrochemotherapy is bringing life to new discoveries, proving high level of stemness markers in pancreatic cancer cells.
|
