Efficient and economical electrical therapy for pancreatic cancers

Pancreatic Adenocarcinoma is the most common pancreatic cancer. This occurs in 90% of all human pancreatic cancers. It is the most devastating disease, with overall 5-year survival rate of only 3-5%. In 2014, it was estimated that in the US, 46,000 new cases will occur with more than 40,000 deaths. This indicates that the current standard of cure is inadequate. Typically they are diagnosed at the late stages only, and hence are not resectable, due to the nearby major arteries and organs. Chemotherapy is also not useful in many patients due to the resistance of the pancreatic cell lines to the drug. As the current therapies offer very limited survival benefits, novel, physical therapeutic strategies are critically needed to treat this aggressive disease. Towards this we used electrically-mediated drug uptake using high intensity short duration pulses. Our results indicate that the drug resistant Panc-28 human pancreatic cells could be effectively killed using 1200V/cm, 100μs and 500V/cm, 25ms pulses. The Gemcitabine, chemo drug concentration was 100uM and the cell deaths were an impressive 67% and 66%, respectively at these two pulses conditions for the drug dose used. This indicates that electrical pulse-mediated chemo drug could be a better option to treat effectively more pancreatic cancer patients who do not respond to current standard of cure of cancer, such as surgery, radiation and chemotherapy.