Pushing boundaries
Sunil Hingorani, pancreatic-cancer researcher
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Sunil Hingorani carefully places slides in succession under the lens of his microscope. He scans each one deliberately, looking for subtle differences in the cancer tissue under examination.
Everything in his lab is uncluttered and organized, indications of his attention to detail. But the calm and ordered environment is fueled by an unparalleled intensity, which even a casual observer can sense as Hingorani meticulously adjusts the eyepiece of the instrument. It's an intensity that enables him to stay awake for days on end to search for answers to one of the most deadly of cancers.
His focus: pancreatic cancer, a disease that is almost uniformly a death sentence by the time it is detected. Early detection is the challenge fueling Hingorani's efforts. Pancreatic cancer begins with such ambiguous symptoms and is so rapidly fatal, it is often caught too late for surgery.
"Pancreatic cancer is unusually lethal. It's essentially 100 percent fatal," Hingorani said. "But when we look closely at the outcomes of patients who were treated with surgery, we see some interesting data that tell us that we should be able to improve survival rates through earlier detection of the disease."
To this end, Hingorani has pioneered one of the most significant breakthroughs on the disease in decades. He helped develop a mouse model that faithfully mimics human pancreatic cancer from its precancerous inception to its advanced stages. This work places him among the first to translate findings in a model organism that may lead the way to early detection and treatment of the human disease. It may also prove essential for studies of vaccine therapy and other drugs that could prevent the disease.
"The median survival after diagnosis of pancreatic cancer is four to six months," Hingorani said. "Should a patient be so lucky as to enroll in a clinical trial, most will only survive long enough to have one shot at an experimental treatment. I believe that every promising drug should be given a chance in the treatment of pancreatic cancer, if there is sufficient scientific rationale to do so. The mouse model could be very useful in expanding those possibilities."
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