(Medical Xpress)—Pancreatic cancer ranks as the fourth-leading cause of cancer death in the United States, and is one of the most deadly forms of cancer, due to its resistance to standard treatments with chemotherapy and radiation therapy and frequently, its late stage at the time of diagnosis. A group of researchers led by the University of Pennsylvania's Perelman School of Medicine and Abramson Cancer Center, in collaboration with scientists from the University of Pittsburgh and University of Washington, published results of a clinical trial in which the standard chemotherapy drug for this disease, gemcitabine, was paired with an agonist CD40 antibody, resulting in substantial tumor regressions among some patients with advanced pancreatic cancer. By using a novel, real-time imaging approach to monitor tumor response to the immunotherapy, the team also found differences how primary and metastatic disease sites shrank. Their work appears online this month in Clinical Cancer Research.
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