Pancreatic Cancer Breakthrough Raises Hopes for a Cure
A group of researchers says they have made a major breakthrough toward finding a cure for pancreatic cancer.
They wrote in a statement that they were able to remove pancreatic tumors in mice "completely."
"The Barbacid group in the CNIO removes pancreatic tumors in mice completely and without resistances appearing," the researchers announced in a statement on the CNIO website. They noted a "significant and long-lasting regression of these experimental tumors without causing significant toxicities."
The findings were announced by a major organization. CNIO stands for The National Cancer Research Center (CNIO), which describes itself as "a public research center under the Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities. It is the largest cancer research center in Spain and one of the most important in Europe." Euro News noted, "the result could be a milestone in the fight against cancer."
Pancreatic cancer "occurs when cells in the pancreas grow out of control and form a growth or tumor," the National Cancer Institute in the U.S. says on its website, noting that more than 67,000 people in the U.S. were diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2025. More than 51,000 people died in the U.S. last year of the cancer.
The Scientists Say the Research Results Open a Pathway to Therapies That Might 'Improve Survival'
(Photo by Roger Kisby/Getty Images)
The researchers explained that "current drugs against pancreatic cancer lose effectiveness in months because the tumor becomes resistant. The group of the National Cancer Research Center (CNIO) manages to avoid these resistances in animal models with a triple combination therapy."
These results “open a pathway to the design of combination therapies that can improve survival,” the authors explained, but they cautioned that "this will not happen in the short term." The results are published in PNAS, or Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, they wrote.
Mariano Barbacid, head of the Experimental Oncology Group at the CNIO, added in the statement that “we are not yet in a position to carry out clinical trials with triple therapy."
The Scientists Explained How the New Findings Worked
The scientists explained the strategy in their statement. "The first drugs targeting pancreatic cancer molecular targets were approved in 2021, after half a century with no improvement over conventional chemotherapy," they wrote. "These new drugs block the action of KRAS, a mutated gene in 90% of people with pancreatic cancer; its effectiveness is nevertheless modest, because within a few months the tumor becomes resistant."
This problem of resistance to KRAS inhibitor drugs" is the one addressed by the new study by Barbacid, a pioneer in both KRAS research and the development of animal models for pancreatic cancer," they added.
"The strategy of the CNIO group has been to block the action of the KRAS oncogene at three points, instead of just one - it is more difficult for a beam to split if it is fixed to the ceiling by three places, rather than just at one point. And, in effect, after genetically removing three molecules from the KRAS signaling pathway in mouse models, the tumors disappeared permanently."