Drug in high demand gets fast-tracked for pancreatic cancer

Hello Nature readers,
This week, we discover that ‘enriched’ CAR T cells might be more effective than conventional ones, hear that early signs of pancreatic cancer can be detected by AI and learn that the United States is allowing early access to an experimental cancer drug.

‘Enriched’ CAR T for blood cancer

Almost half of people with hard-to-treat blood cancer given longer-lived CAR T cells with stem-like characteristics went into remission in a small clinical trial. The ‘enriched’ immunotherapy contained an unusually high proportion of immune cells with properties similar to stem cells (such as the ability to generate many types of T cells). Of 11 people given the treatment, five entered remission and another experienced partial remission. By comparison, one of 10 people given the same dose of conventional CAR-T therapy entered full remission. “On a per-dose basis, these cells definitely seemed more potent,” says cancer immunotherapy researcher Christine Brown. “It’s a first step, but an important one.”

Drug in high demand gets fast-tracked

The US Food and Drug Administration will allow the experimental drug daraxonrasib to be used by people with previously treated advanced pancreatic cancer outside of clinical trials as part of an early-access program. People with pancreatic cancer have been clamouring for greater access to the drug. “The demand for daraxonrasib has been very high for several years now, and only getting higher every time we show any data,” says Mark Goldsmith, the chief executive at Revolution Medicines, which developed the drug.

AI detects early signs of pancreatic cancer

Computed tomography scans taken a year or more before a person develops pancreatic cancer carry signatures of precancer that the human eye can’t easily spot but artificial intelligence can. An AI tool detected early signs of pancreatic cancer with 82% accuracy in scans taken a median of 475 days before diagnosis. “We knew, based on the biology of the disease … that the signal was there,” says radiologist Ajit Goenka. “We just needed to find a way to be able to detect it.” The AI tool, called Radiomics-based Early Detection Model (REDMOD), offers “tangible hope for improving outcomes in this challenging disease”, conclude the authors.

Aspirin for Lynch Sydnrome

Some research has hinted at the possibility that aspirin prevents cancer but it’s almost impossible to prove in the general population because a randomized, controlled study would take decades. It’s much easier to test the impact of aspirin on people who are at high risk of developing cancer. In a 10-year study of 861 people with Lynch syndrome, a genetic condition associated with cancer, taking aspirin daily for at least two years halved the risk of colorectal cancer compared with a control group who took a placebo instead of aspirin. As a result of this and subsequent research, clinical guidelines in the United Kingdom now recommend that people with Lynch Syndrome take aspirin.

Afterglow and exosomes

Fluorescent tags are useful for detecting cancer cells — but they need a continuous light source to be visible, which can introduce noise into the signal. Biomedical engineer Cheng Xu, who is listed as a ‘rising star’ by Nature Index, set about solving this problem by designing a nanoparticle-based ‘afterglow’ probe that shimmers even after the light is turned off. Another ‘rising star’, cancer researcher Guohua Qi, found that the contents of exosomes — bundles of waste and other biological materials that are released by cells — change when people have cancer, partly because the disease unleashes genetic chaos inside cells.