By raising your hand,
how many of you know at least one person on the screen?
Wow, it's almost a full house.
It;s true, they are very famous in their fields.
And do you know what all of them have in common?
They all died of pancreatic cancer.
However, although it's very, very sad this news,
it's also thanks to their personal story
that we have raised awareness of how lethal this disease can be.
It was raised to be the third cause of cancer deaths
and only 8 percent of the patients will survive beyond five years.
That's a very tiny number,
especially if you compare it with breast cancer,
where survival rates is almost 90 percent.
So it doesn't really come as a surprise
that being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer
means facing an enormous certain death sentence.
What's shocking, though, is that in the last 40 years
this number hasn't changed a bit.
While much more progress has been done for other types of tumors.
So how can we make pancreatic cancer treatment more effective?
As a biomedical entrepreneur,
I like to work on problems that seem impossible,
understanding their limitations and trying to find
new innovative solutions that can change their outcome.
The first bad news with pancreatic cancer
is that your pancreas is in the middle of your belly, literally.
It's depicted in orange on the screen.
But you can barely see it until you remove
all of the other organs in front.
It's almost surrounded by many other vital organs,
like the liver, the stomach, the bile duct.
And the ability of this tumor to grow into these organs
is the reason why pancreatic cancer
is one of the most painful tumor types.
The hard-to-reach location also prevents the doctor
from surgically removing it,
as is routinely done for breast cancer, for example.
So all of these reasons leaves as the only option for patient
chemotherapy.
This brings us to the second bad news.
Pancreatic cancer tumors have very few blood vessels.
So why should we care about the blood vessel of a tumor?
Let's think for a second how chemotherapy works.
The drug is injected in the vein
and it navigates throughout the body until it reaches the tumor site.
It's like driving on a highway