Scientist gets cancer grant

A University of Virginia researcher has received a $1.2 million grant to create a method for the widespread early detection of pancreatic cancer, one of the deadliest of all cancers.

Kimberly Kelly, assistant professor of biomedical engineering at UVa’s School of Medicine, received the grant from the National Cancer Institute to develop imaging agents for the early detection of pancreatic cancer. With no screening techniques available to detect pancreatic cancer — unlike, say, colonoscopy for colon cancer and mammography for breast cancer — Kelly hopes to create a compound that could be used for widespread screening.

Early detection of pancreatic cancer could help increase the odds for patients, who face only a 5 percent survival rate beyond five years. “At the time of diagnosis, most of the tumors have spread,” Kelly said. “When the tumor has spread to the liver and into the blood vessels there is not much the surgeon can do to completely remove the tumor.

“In fact, only 15 [percent] to 20 percent of patients have surgically respectable disease, which surgery is in itself rarely curative but does increase median survival to 14 to 22 months. Unfortunately, the majority of cases are at the most advanced stage, four, and are unresectable by the time there is a diagnosis and a potential intervention.”

Kelly, in collaboration with Nabeel Bardeesy of Massachusetts General Hospital, already has isolated early pancreatic cancer cells from a mouse model of human pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma, the most common type of pancreatic cancer.

Kelly is collaborating with UVa assistant professor of surgery Dr. Todd Bauer. She hopes to begin clinical trials that would allow the early detection of the most common form of pancreatic cancer within two years.

In 2007, there were more than 37,000 diagnoses of pancreatic cancer and nearly 34,000 deaths.