2021 New Treatment Accelerator Grant - Prof Phoebe Phillips

Project Summary

Pancreatic cancer (PC) is a deadly disease with survival rates at just 10% and these poor outcomes have seen little improvement for the last 4 decades. One of the key reasons for the dismal response is the fact that no two pancreatic tumours are the same, making it essential to tailor therapies per patient, based on the biology and genetics of the tumour. A major barrier to this approach has been a lack of a systematic mechanism to bring these ideas to patients, in a meaningful timeframe, and allow the power of science to give them a better treatment. The Molecular Screening and Therapeutics (MoST) trials program was designed to overcome this hurdle for a variety of cancers and includes a pancreas cancer-specific sub-program that will underpin this project. This project will support the translation of two new PC-specific clinical trials using existing clinical drugs (RXC004, sulfasalazine) repurposed to tackle the common scar tissue barrier (a key contributor to drug resistance) in pancreatic tumours. The deep analysis of patient pancreatic tumour samples before and after treatment will determine new targeted drug therapies to overcome avenues for drug resistance and for larger clinical trial testing.