Expanding the therapeutic window for pancreatic cancer

Project summary

Pancreatic cancer is unusually lethal. For that reason individuals with a hereditary predisposition to develop such cancer are intensively monitored using medical imaging. Unfortunately we found such screening to be ineffective: disease is only discovered when lethal metastasis has occurred. Encouragingly, we have established that pancreatic juice may allow detection of the disease at a curative stage.

In this project we shall test this notion directly, establish that segment of the patient population for which screening is effective, and determine the psychological effect of such novel screening methodology.