Israel: Scientist’s Research to Treat Pancreatic Cancer in 14 days

95

Tel Aviv University developed a new treatment for Pancreatic cancer that could induce the destruction of cancer cells after two weeks of daily injections of a small molecule known as PJ34 destroys the number of cancerous cells by up to 90%.

Pancreatic cancer is one of the hardest cancers to treat and most people who are diagnosed with the disease do not even live five years after being diagnosed.

The study, led by Prof. Malka Cohen-Armon and her team at TAU’s Sackler Faculty of Medicine, in collaboration with Dr. Talia Golan’s team at the Cancer Research Center at Sheba Medical Center, was recently published in the journal Oncotarget.

Specifically, the study found that PJ34, when injected intravenously, causes the self-destruction of human cancer cells during mitosis, the scientific term for cell division.

The research was conducted with xenografts, transplantation of human pancreatic cancer into immunocompromised mice. “There was a reduction of 90% of pancreatic cells in the tumor,” Cohen-Armon said about her study which results in a month after being injected with the molecule daily for 14 days, she added, “In one mouse, the tumor completely disappeared.”

“This molecule causes an anomaly during mitosis of human cancer cells, provoking rapid cell death,” she said. “Thus, cell multiplication itself resulted in cell death in the treated cancer cells.”

PJ34 appears to have no impact on healthy cells, thus “no adverse effects were observed,” said Cohen-Armon. She added, “The mice continued to grow and gain weight as usual.”

Moreover in 2017, she first published about the mechanism when it was used to effectively treat triple-negative breast cancer implanted in xenografts. This type of breast cancer – which tests negative for estrogen receptors, progesterone receptors and excess HER2 protein – like pancreatic cancer, is very hard to treat and many women don’t live more than five years after being diagnosed.

Though Cohen-Armon said the team did not specifically study whether or not the treatment could prolong the lifespan of a patient, one can assume such an effect could result if the cancerous cells are eliminated.

How long will it take to move from mice trials to human trials?

She estimates that would take “at least two years on the condition that we get enough funding.”