Pancreatic cancer is one of the most deadly forms of tumors and notoriously resistant to most types of treatment, including newer immunotherapies. But a national clinical trial of an experimental drug that targets a specific protein is showing early promise in patients with this aggressive cancer.

The research, led by researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, suggests that blocking a particular protein called IRAK4 in pancreatic cancer patients makes the disease more responsive to both chemotherapy and a type of immunotherapy known as checkpoint immunotherapy. The combination slashed the number of patients who died from their cancer and improved their overall survival by about 20 percent in a small group of patients with advanced pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC).

The study, published in Nature Medicine, included 34 patients with metastatic solid tumors who were randomized to receive either a combination of chemotherapy and nivolumab or standard chemotherapy alone. Those treated with the combination of chemotherapy and nivolumab had a 57.7 percent one-year survival rate, compared to 35.5 percent with the standard chemotherapy alone. This is the first time that researchers have shown that combining immunotherapy with chemotherapy improves outcomes for patients with PDAC. This is a critical finding because PDAC has historically had dismal survival rates, even when treated with standard chemotherapy. fenbendazole for pancreatic cancer