Professor John Zalcberg

Project Summary

Professor John Zalcberg and Dr Daniel Croagh will lead a multi-disciplinary team of researchers, radiologists and surgeons with the aim of comparing European and Australian pancreatic cancer health-care practices. The team will investigate whether treatment options for Australian patients with potentially operable pancreatic tumours are different from those available to similar groups of patients in Europe. The team will use their funding to create an ‘image biobank’ which will hold CT images of newly diagnosed patients with pancreatic cancer in Victoria and New South Wales who are participating in the Upper GI Cancer Registry (UGICR). This registry already collects information on patients with pancreatic cancer in Victoria and New South Wales. One hundred patients with non-metastatic cancer, who have already gone through their treatment, will be chosen and their images are shown to a ‘blinded’ international expert panel. This panel will then assess the operability of the cancer and compare this decision to the actual treatment decisions already made. The results of this research will provide a unique opportunity for clinicians in Australia and Europe to learn from each other to refine decision-making around the operability of pancreatic cancer.