Barcelona research center participates in promising pancreatic cancer trial

Barcelona’s Vall d’Hebron Oncology Institute (VHIO) has participated in a phase III international clinical trial that has demonstrated that olaparib, when administered to pancreatic cancer patients presenting a BRCA gene mutation, can delay the disease’s progression even without chemotherapy.

Olaparib, which is already used to treat ovarian cancer, is the first effective personalized treatment strategy for this subgroup of pancreatic cancer patients and could provide them with a resting period in between chemotherapy sessions.

Although only between 6 and 8% of pancreatic cancer patients carry this mutation and can potentially benefit from this specific drug, VHIO researcher Teresa Macarulla describes her team’s findings as a “first step” towards discovering future treatments that could benefit a wider set of patients affected by this deadly disease. Life expectancy for people with this cancer is under 10% at five years post-diagnosis.

These findings were published in The New England Journal of Medicine and presented at the annual American Society of Clinical Oncology congress in Chicago, where VHIO researchers also presented the positive results of a phase III immunotherapy trial for gastric cancer.