Researchers have developed a cell reprogramming strategy to fight pancreatic cancer. This method could prove to be effective by combining it with existing treatments.
The fourth leading cause of death in France, pancreatic cancer kills 300,000 people per year. In most patients with pancreatic cancer, the diagnosis is made when the disease is already advanced and there is currently no effective treatment. However, a group of researchers from the National Cancer Research Center (CNIO) – whose work has been published in the Proceedings of the journal of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) – may have found a new angle of attack.
One of the characteristics of pancreatic cancer is that the tumor cells are embedded in the stroma, a nourishing tissue which represents 90% of the tumor mass and which constitutes a chemical and physical barrier that interferes with treatment with inhibitors, chemotherapy or immunotherapy. As the authors of this new study point out, most previous studies of pancreatic cancer have focused on tumor cells, but very little has looked at the cells that make up the stroma.
Selective cell reprogramming
Recently, several studies have focused on so-called cancer-associated fibroblasts (CAF), which represent the most abundant cells in the stroma. However, the results showed that the tumor continued to grow even more aggressively. These results therefore suggested that some of the eliminated cells could have anti-tumorigenic functions.
CNIO researchers focused their work on CAFs, in order to find out why and how these cells promote tumor growth, in the hope of reversing the process. An innovative strategy since instead of eliminating these stromal cells which promote tumor growth, the objective of this study was to lead to a selective reprogramming of these cells. Analysis revealed that the presence of a gene called Saa3 encouraged CAFs to trigger tumor progression. By eliminating the Saa3 CAF gene, the researchers found that these cells behaved like normal fibroblasts.
“This tumor is so aggressive and complex that it is necessary to try to attack it from various sources and not just from tumor cells. Our work therefore opens the door to the design of future treatments. to be combined with other strategies, such as immunotherapy, chemotherapy or inhibitors against specific signaling pathways of tumor cells. However, it is still too early to think about its clinical use “, tempers Magdolna Djurec, lead author of the study.
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