BALTIMORE — Most people don’t survive pancreatic cancer - it kills 88 percent of its patients.
But a study of a small group of cancer patients might hold some reassuring results.
Dr. Neeha Zaidi, an oncologist with Johns Hopkins' Kimmel Cancer Center, cares for pancreatic cancer patients, and helped peer-review the study.
"This study looks at a very hard disease," Zaidi said. "Pancreas cancer, which is resistant to most therapies."
A vaccine, the study shows, could help prevent the disease from happening again.
“Basically, what the vaccine does is, to teach, or to educate, one’s own immune system to recognize the cancer as foreign, and attack it," Zaidi told WMAR.
Researchers were looking for a response from participants' 'T-cells' or immune cells. Each participant got a vaccine specific to them. Of the study’s 16 participants, about half got the response researchers were looking for. Now, scientists question why that is.
"This particular, personalized vaccine is really designed for people who have had the cancer, who have had surgery. And the idea is to reduce the chances of recurrence or delay recurrence," added Zaidi.
"This is a small study, so it was really designed to look, to see, 'Is this approach safe?' And I think it did that. It also showed it was feasible, you could do it in a short enough amount of time, which is important when dealing with pancreas cancer," said Zaidi.
