New Weapon Against Deadly Cancer
A form of cancer that is usually fatal almost immediately may be vulnerable to a newly developed line of attack. Researchers say they may have found a way to strike at pancreatic cancer's defenses.
Pancreatic cancer thrives in the body by building a wall around itself and the tumor. This wall, an unusually tough form of the stroma tissue that forms the structural framework of organs as well as tumors, is impenetrable by drugs and invisible to the body's own anti-tumor defenses. This is why pancreatic cancer, the illness that killed actor Patrick Swayze in September 2009, has been considered incurable.
A new treatment, however, uses not anti-tumor cells but a broader kind of immune cell called a macrophage to destroy the tumor by destroying its stroma cells. This discovery, scientists say, may lead to more effective and less expensive treatments for the disease.