Could a new jab do away with pancreatic cancer?

SCIENTISTS are trialling a potentially groundbreaking vaccine that they hope will protect people from developing pancreatic cancer.

A team at Johns Hopkins University in the US has just given the jab to their first volunteer, a woman with a family history of the disease.

They want to equip her body with the tools to identify rogue cells that could become cancerous, enabling her immune system to launch preemptive ‘search and destroy’ missions that will nip the problem in the bud.

A novel approach to the disease – which claims at least 480 lives a year in Ireland – is desperately needed. While survival rates for other major cancers have improved, they remain stubbornly low for pancreatic cancer, with threequarters dying within a year of diagnosis. Dirty Dancing star Patrick Swayze died with it, aged 57, in 2009, and former finance minister Brian Lenihan died with it in 2011, 18 months after being diagnosed.

Oncologist Dr Neeha Zaidi, who is leading the trial, said: ‘The best way of treating this disease is catching it early because it’s so challenging. As the cancer develops, it becomes harder to treat. And it’s very good at hiding from our immune system.’

The trial will initially involve 25 healthy volunteers at high risk of pancreatic cancer due to family history. But Dr Zaidi warned it could take a decade to get hard evidence that the vaccine prevented pancreatic cancer. ‘This is the first step to a very large goal,’ she stressed.