Good news in the fight against pancreatic cancer

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