PITTSBURGH — Pancreatic cancer is a silent disease, said Dr. Aatur Singhi, a surgical pathologist at the UPMC Department of Pathology and an associate professor at the University of Pittsburgh. It often is not detected until it has spread to other organs, making it difficult to treat.
To help change that, Pitt scientists led the development of a new gene sequencing tool, called PancreaSeq, to better detect the status of pancreatic cysts. The results of their research — a collaboration between 31 medical institutions around the world and funded partially by the National Cancer Institute — were published in the journal Gastroenterology last month. The new technology is intended to lead to more specialized treatment of patients with cysts.
Around 62,000 Americans are diagnosed with pancreatic cancer yearly, and numbers are increasing, according to statistics from the National Cancer Institute. Pancreatic cancer is often deadly. While it made up around 3% of total cancer cases in 2022, it is responsible for 8.2% of cancer deaths, and survival rates are grim: only 11.5% of people survived five years after their diagnosis.
