Thanks Redwood71. This is a very informative post.
I suspected that the spread of cancer beyond the pancreas was a major reason why a transplant wouldn’t help the situation. Didn’t even consider that the anti-rejection treatments would make the cancer situation even worse.
There are always exceptions, but very few. “Nobody knows why these patients live longer than other people with pancreatic cancer,” says Vinod Balachandran, a surgeon-scientist affiliated with the David M. Rubenstein Center for Pancreatic Cancer Research and a member of the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy at Memorial Sloan Kettering who specializes in the disease. “But something is clearly setting them apart.”
In a study, he and his colleagues set out to identify what that something is. Suspecting that the immune system might be involved, they looked at the number of immune cells present in a tumor and found the more immune cells, the longer the survival. Dr. Balachandran and his colleagues, including Jedd Wolchok, Timothy Chan, Steven Leach, and Taha Merghoub, looked at patients whose pancreatic tumors were surgically removed and who in some cases received subsequent chemotherapy. Compared with pancreatic tumors from people who had low survival rates, tumors from long-term survivors (average survival of six years) had nearly 12 times the number of immune cells called T cells inside them.
But this, again, is based upon findings from patients whose cancer had not spread to other parts of the body thus the cancer was able to be surgically removed as it was isolated. Science still has not figured out the process to get the right t cells to the area and make the body accept their help through use of neoantigens. A very complex process we don’t understand yet. Someday we may and this process could be used for a number of cancers.
rwood