Lethal pancreatic tumours can be rendered sensitive to chemotherapy by degrading a sugar-based matrix in the tumour that boosts fluid pressure and prevents the inward flow of blood.
Sunil Hingorani at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, Washington, and his team show that pancreatic tumours in mice have much higher fluid pressures than healthy mouse pancreases owing to high levels of a sugar-based polymer produced by the tumours. An enzyme that chews away the matrix returns fluid pressure to normal, opening up the blood vessels that feed the tumour and allowing chemotherapeutic drugs to penetrate.
Mice treated with a combination of the enzyme and a cancer drug developed fewer tumours and metastases and lived longer — 91.5 days compared with 55.5 — than animals treated with the drug only.
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Tumours yield to pressure relief. Nature 484, 9 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1038/484009b
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/484009b
