Main Line Researchers Find New Potential Pancreatitis Treatment

Medical researchers on the Main Line have uncovered a potential new way to treat pancreatitis, which can be a contributing factor to increased pancreatic cancer risks.

According to Main Line Health, researchers at the Lankenau Institute for Medical Research (LIMR), part of Main Line Health, showed that elevated levels of a specific protein led to symptoms of pancreatitis, and when coupled with the presence of a genetic mutation, led to the development of pancreatic cancer.

The study was led by Professor Janet Sawicki, PhD, deputy director of LIMR, as well as LIMR researchers Weidan Peng, Narumi Furuuchi, Ludmila Aslanukova and Yu-Hung Huang. Collaborators from the Sidney Kimmel Cancer Center at Thomas Jefferson University, and the University of Kansas Medical Center, also contributed to the study.

The LIMR researchers centered their studies on the RNA-binding protein Human antigen R (HuR) that, in normal circumstances, helps maintain cells throughout the body in a healthy state.

However, when healthy cells are stressed from environmental factors – such as smoking and alcohol consumption – or in the case of tumor cells, from chemotherapy or nutrient depletion, HuR levels increase and regulate genes that promote an inflammatory microenvironment leading — the LIMR researchers discovered — to chronic pancreatitis, a disease in which the pancreas becomes inflamed.

After unveiling the link between HuR-mediated inflammation and pancreatitis-like symptoms, the scientists then set out to try to determine the cellular mechanism that leads from pancreatitis to pancreatic cancer.

"We found in our preclinical studies that when the pancreas is inflamed due to elevated HuR and a genetic mutation in the K-ras gene is present, the incidence of pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma increased more than three-fold when compared to the presence of the K-ras mutation alone,"Sawicki said. "We found that HuR over expression alone does not cause cancer, but when it is paired with an oncogenic initiating event such as a K-ras mutation, the incidence of pancreatic cancer increases."

In the U.S., about 53,000 people will be diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2017, according to the American Cancer Society. Unfortunately,the disease has a one-year survival rate of only 20 percent, and a five-year survival rate of just 7 percent.

“These are exciting findings, because they offer proof-of-concept of a novel therapeutic target for pancreatitis — namely, mediation of HuR expression in the pancreas — that could, in turn, reduce the risk of pancreatic cancer," Peng said.

The research was funded by the National Institutes of Health, the W.W. Smith Charitable Foundation, the Mary Halinski Pancreatic Cancer Research Fund, and the Lankenau Medical Center Foundation.

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