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
trying to reach a destination.

But what if your destination
doesn't have an exist on the highway?

You will never get there.

And that's exactly the same problem
for chemotherapy and pancreatic cancer.

The drugs navigate throughout
all of your body.

They will reach healthy organs,

resulting in high toxic effect
for the patients overall.

But very little will go to the tumor.

Therefore, the efficacy is so limited.

To me, it seems very counterintuitive
to have a whole body treatment

to target a specific organ.

However, in the last 40 years,

a lot of money, research and effort
has gone towards

finding new, powerful drugs
to treat pancreatic cancer,

but nothing has been done
in changing the way

it's delivered to the patient.

So here, after two bad news,

I'm going to give you
good news, hopefully.

With a collaborator at MIT and the
Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston,

we have revolutionized the way
we treat cancer

by making localized drug delivery
a reality.

We are basically parachuting you
on top of your destination,

avoiding you from driving all around
the highway.

We have embedded the drug into devices
that looks like this one.

They are flexible enough that they
can be folded to fit into the catheter

so that the doctor can implant
directly on top of the rumor

with a minimal invasive surgery.

But they are solid enough that once
they are positioned

on top of the tumor,

they will act as a cage.

They will actually physically prevent
the tumor from entering other organs,

preventing mestaticies(?)

The devices are also biodegradable.

That means that once in the body,

they start dissolving,

delivering the drug only locally,
slowly and more effective

than what it done with the current
whole-body treatment.

In pre-clinical study,
we have demonstrated

that this localized approach

is able to improve of 12x
the response to treatment.

So we took a drug that is
already known

and by just delivering it locally
where it's needed the most,

we allow a response
that is 12x more powerful,

reducing the systemic toxic effect.

We are working relentlessly to bring
this technology to the next level.

We are finalizing the pre-clinical testing

and the animal model required
to ask the FDA for approval

for clinical trials.

Currently, the majority of the patients
will die of pancreatic cancer.

We are hoping that one day,

we can reduce their pain,
extend their life,

and potentially make pancreatic cancer
a curable disease.

By re-thinking the way we deliver
the drug,

we don't only make them
more powerful and less toxic,

we are also opening the door
to finding new innovative solution

for almost all other impossible
problems

in pancreatic cancer patients
and beyond.

Thank you very much.

(Applause)