Canadian pancreatic cancer researchers, including those at the Princess Margaret Cancer Centre, are joining forces under a Terry Fox Research Institute initiative to help tackle this deadly disease.
"For many years it's been hopeless from a patient perspective, and we are hoping to help shift this," says Dr. Daniel Renouf of BC Cancer Agency and the University of British Columbia (UBC) who, along with Dr. David Schaeffer of the Vancouver General Hospital and UBC, is leading a $5-million pan-Canadian, precision medicine initiative.
In addition to Drs. Renouf and Schaeffer, Principal Investigators of the study include Drs. Jennifer Knox and Steven Gallinger, who are Cancer Clinical Research Unit (CCRU) members at the Princess Margaret Cancer Centre.
A lack of early detection tests. Few known symptoms. Very limited treatment options. No known biomarkers that can be used to direct therapy. These are among the clinical challenges team EPPIC, short for Enhanced Pancreatic Cancer Profiling for Individualized Care, is tackling over the next five years to improve personalized treatments for patients with pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma, a disease with a five-year survival rate of just nine per cent.
"Our project focuses on metastatic cancer versus surgically resectable primary tumours, because this is the clinical problem we see most often," says Dr. Schaeffer, noting a priority is to discern if the metastatic and primary tumour differ in their genetic make-up.
Genomic sequencing and bioinformatics analyses of patient tumours will be conducted at the OICR and the BC Cancer Genome Sciences Centre.
This project is currently under way in Toronto and Vancouver, and is expanding to include up to 400 eligible patients in Montreal, Kingston, Ottawa, Calgary and Edmonton. More than 100 patients from the McCain Centre for Pancreatic Cancer at the Princess Margaret have already participated in the COMPASS trial, initially funded by Ontario Institute for Cancer Research (OICR), Pancreatic Cancer Canada (PCC) and The Princess Margaret Cancer Foundation. Early results were published in late 2017 in Clinical Cancer Research.
"Only with national collaboration can we move forward at pace with global understanding of this disease and make a significant contribution," says Dr. Knox, Principal Investigator of COMPASS and co-Director of the McCain Centre.
Many of the EPPIC team's investigators are members of PancOne, an initiative of PCC that brings together pancreas researchers from across the country. The foundational funding from PCC has also been integral in establishing a strong framework from which to build pan-Canadian collaboration.
Source: UHN.ca