TAMPA, Fla. – Pancreatic cancer, a highly lethal malignancy, is the fourth most common cause of cancer-related mortality in the United States. Approximately 25 percent of patients with early cancers undergo potential curative treatment with surgery and chemotherapy. Unfortunately, only about 30 percent of patients who receive this intervention experience long-term cure.Part of this high mortality rate is attributed to a lack of effective diagnostic and prognostic tests. Researchers at Moffitt Cancer Center have utilized modern advanced technology and developed a prognostic test that can determine which early-stage pancreatic cancer patients will have a better outcome following surgery.
“There is an unmet need to develop a reliable test which will better predict prognosis for patients with early pancreatic cancer and thereby allow for personalized treatment and the wise investigation of novel interventions. New strategies, such as our discovery of a gene signature that can discriminate between patients, hold the promise that in the future patients who will not benefit from surgery can be identified and offered other treatments that may be more beneficial to them,” said first author Dung-Tsa Chen, Ph.D., senior member of the Biostatistics and Bioinformatics Department at Moffitt.
