Earlier this year, one 黑料吃瓜资源 discovery ended up on and the . Now, hear more about the knowledge gaps that make this discovery so crucial and the noble goals that fuel this work in the first place.
Read the related story: In pancreatic cancer, a race against time
Transcript
Nick Fiore: You鈥檙e now At the Lab with 黑料吃瓜资源. My name is Nick Fiore, and this week At the Lab, 鈥淐atch me if you cancer.鈥�
NF: Early detection is crucial for successful cancer treatment. However, in many cases, cancer detection feels like a cruel game of catch me if you can. An extreme example is pancreatic cancer.
NF: According to the Lustgarten Foundation, the world鈥檚 largest private funder of pancreatic cancer research, there are currently no early warning signs for this disease and no effective screening methods. That鈥檚 the impetus for recent studies by Claudia Tonelli, a research investigator working with Professor David Tuveson in the Lustgarten Foundation Pancreatic Cancer Research Laboratory at Cold Spring Harbor.
Claudia Tonelli: We know that healthy adults have precancerous lesions in their pancreas. Of course, the chance of having them increases with age, but all of us will at some point have this precursor lesion in the pancreas. However, only very few of us will develop pancreatic cancer. So, we were interested in understanding how these precancerous lesions evolve into cancer.
NF: The idea is that if we understand the biology of this transformation, we may be able to intercept it.
NF: For pancreatic cancer, that鈥檇 be huge, because, as mentioned earlier, the disease is very hard to detect. The pancreas lies deep in the abdomen, behind the stomach. So, during routine examinations, doctors don鈥檛 see or feel tumors developing there.
NF: For now, known risk factors include chronic pancreatitis, diabetes, and a family history of pancreatic cancer.
CT: So, for the moment, these are some of the patient populations we will be looking at. But hopefully, in the future, we will be able to further understand how these precursor lesions that most of us have will progress. And then this knowledge will become more useful.
NF: Uses could include everything from treatments with fewer harmful side effects to better diagnostic tools and even new prevention strategies. In other words, one day we could be looking at a situation where we鈥檙e not just able to catch pancreatic cancer earlier. We鈥檇 be able to catch it before it becomes cancer in the first place鈥攐nce again saving thousands of lives through the power of fundamental biology.
NF: Thank you once again for joining us At the Lab. If you like what you heard, please subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and visit us online at CSHL.edu for more fundamental biology breakthroughs like this one. For 黑料吃瓜资源, I鈥檓 Nick Fiore, and I鈥檒l see you next time At the Lab.