Fewer than one in 12 people diagnosed with pancreatic cancer will be alive five years later. The insidious and aggressive disease has defied attempts to improve its survival rate, which remains under eight per cent after five years.
The death rate is rising by 0.3 per cent per year and experts predict that by 2020, pancreatic cancer will be the second highest cause of Australian cancer deaths behind lung cancer. It is indiscriminate and ruthless, having killed the likes of Apple founder Steve Jobs, actors Patrick Swayze, John Hurt and Alan Rickman, singer Luciano Pavarotti and musician Dizzy Gillespie.
“Pancreatic cancer remains one of the most lethal cancers due to a lack of early diagnosis methods and effective treatment options,”.
Pancreatic cancer is considered deadly due to its low survival rate. But Targeted therapy is often one of the best treatment options for pancreatic cancer.
How Targeted Therapy Helps To Control Locally Advanced Pancreatic Cancer
Targeted therapy is cancer treatment that uses drugs to attack unique aspects of cancer cells, therefore causing little harm to healthy cells. For example, targeted therapies can work by blocking cellular receptors or pathways believed to play a role in the development of cancer, thereby stopping the growth of a tumor.
What Targeted Therapies are available for pancreatic cancer ?
In November 2005, the targeted therapy Erlotinib is approved by the FDA for patients with advanced pancreatic cancer in combination with Gemcitabine. Erlotinib blocks the effect of the epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR), a protein that can become abnormal and help cancer grow and spread.
In May 2011,the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved both Everolimus (Afinitor®) and Sunitinib (Sutent®) for the treatment of progressive neuroendocrine tumors of pancreatic origin (PNET) in patients with unresectable, locally advanced or metastatic disease.
Other targeted therapies for pancreatic cancer are still under investigation in the laboratory or in clinical trials. Clinical trials are research studies that test new treatments in order to find better ways to treat pancreatic cancer. They provide patients the opportunity to receive a promising drug or treatment and are the only way to make progress in treating the disease.
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Source : https://chronicmedicines.wordpress.com/2018/04/19/how-targeted-therapy-treat-pancreatic-cancer/