Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center specialists have figured out how to accurately test drive chemotherapy drugs to learn in advance which drug treatments offer each individual pancreatic cancer patient the best therapeutic journey.Test driving cancer drugs is used widely to test cancer therapies, the Hopkins design is personalized to each patient who has relapsed after an initial course of chemotherapy. The standard drug given at this point is gemcitabine, which has a success rate of less than 10 percent.

Reporting on their work in a recent issue of Clinical Cancer Research and at the September meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research in Chicago, the Hopkins team said it took tiny bits of a patient’s tumor removed after surgery, and implanted them into one or two mice. This process currently requires about six months to get the information on which drugs work best.

Manuel Hidalgo, M.D. Ph.D., associate professor at Hopkin’s Kimmel Cancer Center says that “In the meantime, most patients are receiving their first rounds of chemotherapy and radiation. This information can guide therapy once patients relapse, which is generally in nine to twelve months with pancreatic cancer”.

Pancreatic cancer accounts for more than 33,000 new cases in the United States and almost as many deaths. Less than five percent of patients living beyond five years.

Chemobrain, a term used to describe the mental fog and confusion some women experience after chemotherapy treatment, is very real and researchers who studied the frontal lobe brain activity of women suffering from the occurrence have an explanation for why chemobrain happens. Based on a study done by University of California researchers, chemotherapy drugs disrupt the brain’s metabolism and blood flow.

“The same area of the frontal lobe that showed lower resting metabolism displayed a substantial leap in activity when the patients were performing the memory exercise,” said Daniel Silverman, the UCLA associate professor who led the study. “In effect, these women’s brains were working harder than the control subjects to recall the same information.”

The current study is published in the online edition of Breast Cancer Research and Treatment.