Nanomedicine platforms for pancreatic cancer therapy

Pancreatic cancer is one of the most difficult to treat cancers in the western world. Currently, once diagnosed, patients only have a 6% chance of surviving up to 5 years. Over the past 40 years, pancreatic cancer therapies have not had a major impact on patient outcomes. Because pancreatic cancer is so difficult to treat and therefore a lot of new drug candidates fail in trials, pharmaceutical companies are unwilling to invest in new technologies for pancreatic cancer therapy without very solid evidence showing that they are more beneficial than what’s already available.

One such platform which has shown great promise in this area is nanotechnology. This will involve the use of nanosized materials (1 - 100 nm in diameter) that can carry multiple drugs and / or imaging agents. It is the purpose of this project to explore the use of nanomedicines and nanotechnology to determine whether they are safe to use and, ultimately, whether they should progress to clinical trial. Additionally, it is estimated that the project will be able to test and report on between 3 and 5 novel formulations for treating pancreatic cancer. Comparisons will be made of the effectiveness   of any novel treatments with existing chemotherapy treatments.  The data arising from this project will be collated, analysed and disseminated, where possible, through academic publications and talks at conferences. 

It is hoped that, from this project, there will be long term benefits for healthcare providers as more effective therapies lead to less cancer recurrence and patient bed-time, so economically these could be favourable. But, ultimately, all the work done in this project focuses on patients as an endpoint, and we aim to provide better therapies for patients diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.