IL13Rα2-targeted therapy for pancreatic cancer
Research type
Research Study
Full title
Investigation of IL13Rα2-targeted therapy for pancreatic cancer
IRAS ID
220376
Contact name
Venkateswarlu Kanamarlapudi
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
Swansea University
Duration of Study in the UK
2 years, 11 months, 31 days
Research summary
Pancreatic cancer has a very poor survival rate with currently only 5% of newly-diagnosed patients surviving for more than 5 years. This extremely poor outlook is in part due to the fact that pancreatic tumours are highly resistant to standard cancer drug treatments. Therefore, new treatment options are urgently required for this type of cancer. In this regard, we and others have shown that the interleukin-13 receptor alpha 2 (IL-13Rα2) protein is over-expressed on the surface of pancreatic cancer cells, highlighting the possibility that this molecule may represent a novel drug target. Towards this end, we have developed a small peptide-based drug (Pep1-Phor21) that specifically binds to IL-13Rα2 on the surface of tumour cells and selectively kills them. Unlike many standard chemotherapies which operate inside cells, this new drug should be more effective as it rapidly kills cancer cells by working outside at the cell surface, circumventing many of the drug-resistance problems associated with established chemotherapies. To date, we have extensively investigated the specific activity of the experimental drug on cultured pancreatic tumour cell lines and to gain further insight as to how this drug will perform in patients, it is now essential that we further investigate the expression of the drug target and define the activity of this new drug on primary tumour samples from patients.
REC name
East Midlands - Nottingham 1 Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
17/EM/0071
Date of REC Opinion
15 Feb 2017
REC opinion
Favourable Opinion