2023 New Treatment Grant - Dr Daniel Croagh

Project Summary

Metastatic pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (mPDA) is an aggressive form of cancer with very poor outcomes. It is generally treated with traditional chemotherapy, but even with chemotherapy, average life expectancy of patients with mPDA is under 1 year. In the search for treatments to improve life expectancy for cancer patients, immunotherapy drugs that boost the immune system, like pembrolizumab, are increasingly being used. Unfortunately, so far, they have not helped people suffering from mPDA. Another drug, Olaparib, works by preventing cancer cells repairing themselves. Combining olaparib with pembrolizumab may be a better way of boosting the immune system. We think that the people most likely to benefit from combining these two drugs are those mPDA patients whose tumours contain very high amounts of genetic changes (“mutations”) that will help the body’s immune system seek out and kill the cancer cells more easily. These tumours are described as having high mutational burden (“high TMB”). High TMB can be identified by examining tumour samples, or biopsies. We plan to identify patients with both mPDA and high TMB and offer them treatment with pembrolizumab plus olaparib in this international clinical trial.