Pancreatic cancer is one of the most aggressive and deadly forms of cancer. The five-year survival rate is just 13%. On average, patients survive for only nine months after diagnosis and roughly 66,000 people are diagnosed in the U.S. each year. Now, researchers from Henry Ford Health and MSU are coming together to share their knowledge and expertise with the aim of changing this somber prognosis.
“I completely believe in team science,” said Jennifer Klomp, a pancreatic cancer researcher at Michigan State University. “I think the resulting science is better and more rigorous. You come at something with different approaches, different ways of thinking and different ideas. And the output, in the end, is more beneficial.”
Klomp, who is also an assistant professor in the Department of Medicine at the Michigan State University College of Human Medicine, recently joined MSU, partly because of the opportunity to conduct team science with pancreatic cancer researchers at Henry Ford Health. This is part of the partnership between the two organizations. Her husband, Jeff Klomp, also a pancreatic cancer researcher and assistant professor, joined MSU at the same time. Their labs are located at the Grand Rapids Research Center.
“The Henry Ford Health + Michigan State University Health Sciences partnership really gave us confidence that we could be part of a pancreatic cancer research community,” Klomp said. “Howard Crawford, a senior researcher at Henry Ford Health, developed a research organization dedicated to pancreatic cancer care. He’s added people who have diverse experience, which has opened multiple collaborative projects between our groups.”
About pancreatic cancer
“Early symptoms are pretty nonspecific,” said Crawford, who is also a research professor in the Department of Pharmacology and Toxicology in the College of Human Medicine. “The most common risk factor is age. Most people are diagnosed in their mid-70s. Common symptoms are back pain, gastrointestinal problems and jaundice. All of these can also be attributed to other conditions, especially in patients who are over 70 years old. And that’s why it’s so hard to diagnose this cancer at an early stage.
“The wasting effect also happens with pancreatic cancer,” he added. “In a very short amount of time, people will go from looking fully healthy to like a ghost of their former selves. Unfortunately, the actor Patrick Swayze was an example of that.”
Reasons for hope
“When I started as a pancreatic cancer researcher in 2017, the goal was to get five-year survival rates into double digits,” Klomp said. “Now we’re at 13%, and I think that number is going to increase significantly, very quickly.”
“There has been a core cluster of senior researchers who started recruiting people into the pancreatic cancer field and I happened to be included in the early stages,” Crawford said. “This is an incredibly supportive field. We all really want this disease to go away.”
Currently, Henry Ford + MSU pancreatic cancer researchers are focused on genetic indicators that play a crucial role in the ways cells communicate through the exchange of chemical signals. As pancreatic cancer cell behaviors are identified, researchers can start to create pharmaceutical drugs and work toward cures.
“RAS was identified as an oncogene in 1982 and is the prominent driver of pancreatic cancer,” Klomp said. “The fact that we have known about the prominent driver of pancreatic and other cancers for so long has made it an obvious therapeutic target. But it hasn’t been easy. It took nearly 40 years because RAS is kind of like a greasy ball or a tennis ball so there have not been obvious spots for a drug to bind and block its activity.”
The Henry Ford + MSU team is working with the National Cancer Institute and others to manage RAS activity, which has implications for lung and colorectal cancer patients too.
“The exciting thing for pancreatic cancer patients is that we are already seeing improvements from drugs that are RAS inhibitors,” Klomp said. “And if we can use an RAS inhibitor to shrink a tumor to a size that can be helped with surgery, maybe we can also improve the patient’s quality of life and extend life in later-stage patients.”
The team also manages a large biobank that includes blood and tumor samples from a diverse population of patients.
“Researchers around the world ask for access to our tissue database and biobank,” Crawford said. “Right now, pancreatic cancer is impossible to detect in the early stages, so having blood collected from 600 diverse patients is the gold standard.
“The big hope for us right now is the RAS inhibitors, and that’s a major part of the research programs for Jenny and Jeff Klomp,” he added. “We’re thrilled to have them on board, and it’s been absolutely seamless.”
