Periodic Reporting for period 1 - PAVE (A nanovaccine Approach for the treatment of Pancreatic Cancer)
Reporting period: 2019-10-01 to 2021-09-30
highest mortal ity rate compared to other major cancers, resulting in excess of 250,000 deaths worldwide per annum.
Current state-of-art therapies for advanced PDAC including chemo- and/or radiotherapy, despite extensive efforts, have met with only l imited success. Surgery is only appl icable for those with early stages of the disease, or to relieve symptoms, if the cancer is blocking the bile duct or the bowel . There are two major reasons for the resistance of PDAC to conventional therapy. Firstly, PDAC has a very defining hal lmark, where an abundance of stromal content is present in the tumour microenvironment to form a physical and biochemical barrier. Secondly, during progression of the disease, the body's immune system is hijacked to support the prol iferation of the cancer.
New approaches, such as immunotherapy, are therefore needed where it has already shown promise in overcoming many aspects of this resistance. Immunotherapy has the potential to treat minimal residual disease after pancreatic
resection (surgery) as wel l as for metastatic and non-resectable PDAC. Our objective for this project is to bring together a multidisciplinary and intersectoral group to develop novel vaccine approaches, including use of multiple
immunomodulating components.