Cancer cells acquire resistance to chemotherapy drugs by several different mechanisms such as DNA mutations and metabolic changes. In this article, a recently identified mechanism of drug resistance in pancreatic cancer is discussed along with the data from the pre-clinical studies. Pancreatic cancer (pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma) is a highly malignant disease which has a 5-year survival rate of 7%.
Presently, there aren’t any effective screening tests for early diagnosis of pancreatic cancer and hence it often gets diagnosed too late. There are very few therapeutic options are available then and the most potentially curative option remains surgery followed by chemotherapy. However, several intrinsic (post-transcriptional gene regulation and somatic mutations) as well as extrinsic (hypoxia and tumor microenvironment) factors contribute to the resistance of pancreatic cancer cells to…
