Pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma is one of the most deadly and aggressive human cancers, because it’s often detected at a very late stage and there are no effective treatments. Fewer than 10 percent of people diagnosed with pancreatic cancer are still alive five years after diagnosis.

Now a researcher at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio is trying to develop a model system to understand pancreatic cancer, in order to detect its early stages and improve patients’ long-term survival. Pei Wang was recruited in 2012 from Stanford University School of Medicine with the help of a First-Time Tenure-Track Award from CPRIT.

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Pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma is one of the most deadly and aggressive human cancers, because it’s often detected at a very late stage and there are no effective treatments. Fewer than 10 percent of people diagnosed with pancreatic cancer are still alive five years after diagnosis.

Now a researcher at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio is trying to develop a model system to understand pancreatic cancer, in order to detect its early stages and improve patients’ long-term survival. Pei Wang was recruited in 2012 from Stanford University School of Medicine with the help of a First-Time Tenure-Track Award from CPRIT.

Wang’s model system starts with normal human pancreatic tissue taken from organ donors. Using genetic methods, she modifies genes that are frequently mutated in pancreatic cancer to see if she can cause cancer to develop in the normal human cells. These modifications include introducing tumor-promoting genes and inactivating tumor suppressor genes.

So far, she has simultaneously introduced the four most frequently mutated genes in pancreatic cancer, and found that she can indeed cause human cancers to develop. This is the first model system of its kind in the world for pancreatic cancer. Next, she wants to introduce each mutation one at a time, to see what minimum change is required in order for the tissue to become cancerous.

“We really want to better understand the early initiation events of this cancer,” Wang says, “because by doing so, we may be able to find a way to detect it early, as well as see if there is a chance to prevent the tumor from growing any further or spreading, if we can detect it in the early stages.”

She is also thinking about ways these genetic pathways involved in pancreatic cancer initiation could be targets for drug discovery. Her model system could also be used to screen for drug candidates.

Wang says she was initially inspired to work on pancreatic cancer because she was a fan of Houston-born actor Patrick Swayze, who died of the disease in 2009 at age 57, less than two years after being diagnosed. At the time, she was already studying insulin-producing cells in the pancreas as a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford, and decided to switch her focus to creating a model system for pancreatic cancer.

“I didn’t have a cancer background, but I did have other knowledge and skills,” says Wang, like familiarity with the pancreas and knowing how to genetically modify genes. “And since this was a new concept, I got funding to work on it.” If she had not received the CPRIT funding for her cancer research, she says, she might have just continued working on the insulin-producing cells. She says she has learned a lot from the other faculty working on cancer at UT Health San Antonio, and credits CPRIT for helping her career progress and develop. She has received more than $2 million in follow-on federal funding for her research.

Wang was an undergraduate at East China University of Science and Technology in Shanghai, and received her Ph.D. from Baylor College of Medicine. She began her postdoctoral training at Stanford in 2004.

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