OHIO — Right now, there are about 60,000 cases of pancreatic cancer being diagnosed in the US each year.
Roughly 95% of people die from it because the disease is hard to detect in the early stages.
However, researchers at University Hospitals hope to change this after finding an interesting link between sugar and pancreatic cancer.
“We think that it's a promising line of investigation,” said Dr. Jordan Winter at UH Seidman Cancer Center.
Winter is the Chief of Surgical Oncology and the Director of Surgical Services and tells News 5’s Remi Murrey he’s feeling hopeful after discovering promising news that could help those battling pancreatic cancer.
“Increased glucose levels are associated with improved response to standard conventional chemotherapy,” said Winter.
Winter says that although this investigation is still in the very beginning stages this is what research has shown thus far.
“We increased the glucose levels of mice, we made them hyperglycemic like a diabetic, and we did that just by increasing the concentration of glucose in their drinking water,” said Winter.
“We injected these mice with pancreatic cancer, and we found that when we gave them low doses of chemotherapy, the chemotherapy worked really well and when the sugar levels were normal in those mice, it didn't work so well.”
So, exactly how will this work on patients?
“The next step for us is to test the hypothesis to see if it can do that,” said Winter.
Pancreatic cancer is one of the most difficult cancers to treat. It's also extremely resistant to chemotherapy.
But Winter says they couldn’t understand why, so University Hospitals did research, which led them to this discovery about glucose when fighting against pancreatic cancer.
“If conditions are really nutrients deprived ordinarily, and that's what's driving resistance to chemotherapy, why can't we just sensitize the cancer to chemotherapy by making the conditions more favorable and increasing the level of nutrients which hopefully would essentially deactivate that force field,” said Winter.
Winter understands it may seem strange for doctors to allow patients to have high levels of blood sugar. But he says it could be key in saving people’s lives who have pancreatic cancer.
“It does look like it can help at least in animal experiments,” said Winter.
While there’s still more research to be done, Alisa Warshay, who volunteers with Cleveland’s Pancreatic Cancer Action Network, says she’s optimistic something can be found after losing her dad to pancreatic cancer in 2017.
“I know that University Hospitals does quite a bit of research on pancreatic cancer and has a real passion for getting to some better treatments and solutions to help people live longer and even develop hopefully a diagnostic test sometime in the future,” said Warshay, a volunteer with Cleveland’s Pancreatic Cancer Action Network.
Winter expects to begin clinical trials on this study sometime next year.
