According to an abstract presented at the Society of Interventional Radiology's 37th Annual Scientific Meeting in San Francisco, there may be a new treatment option available to patients with inoperable locally advanced pancreatic cancer.
The treatment is a procedure referred to as irreversible electroporation, or IRE. IRE uses microsecond electrical pulses to force open and destroy tumor cells around a vast and delicate network of blood vessels of the pancreas. This procedure has shown to be successful against both primary and advanced liver cancer, and it is now being explored against pancreatic cancers.
Currently, patients with inoperable locally advanced pancreatic cancer have a survival time of under one year, and have few effective treatment options, as neither chemotherapy nor radiation have proven especially effective. IRE offers a potential new therapeutic response because it uses guided electrode needles sent into the tumor. A series of jolts of localized high-voltage electricity damages the cancer cells and contribute to the break-up of the cell membranes, killing the cancerous tissues around these blood vessels without causing damage to those vital blood vessels maintaining the pancreas.
Researchers believe that in another one to two years they will have better data about the efficacy of this procedure.
Source: MarketWatch
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