Dr. Paul Oberstein shares an overview of recent breakthroughs in pancreatic cancer research—including new targeted therapies that target key mutations like KRAS, found in many patients. Dr. Oberstein explains how scientific progress is leading to promising treatments that could improve outcomes and offer hope for the future of pancreatic cancer care.
Dr. Paul Oberstein is Section Chief of Gastrointestinal (GI) Oncology at NYU Langone and Assistant Director of the Pancreatic Cancer Center of NYU Langone’s Perlmutter Cancer Center. Learn more about Dr. Oberstein.
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Transcript
Jamie Forward:
Dr. Oberstein, what are some of the most promising advances in pancreatic cancer care and research that patients should know about?
Dr. Paul Oberstein:
So, this is my opportunity. I’m very passionate about pancreatic cancer and research. I would say that there’s been a tremendous effort by scientists and clinicians like myself to try to learn more about what’s driving this disease. And it’s been going on for a couple decades. There’s been a lot of effort into this.
Initially, I think there was disappointment that we didn’t find cures faster. And I can say confidently, that now when I go to meetings, we’re seeing a lot of these efforts that took place over decades finally coming to fruition. So, the most promising and exciting thing is that many, many patients, 95 percent of patients with pancreatic cancer will have a mutation in a gene called KRAS. K-R-A-S. And for many years we knew this, and we’ve been trying to find ways to target that gene.
And finally, we have the first clinical trials, which I’ve participated in, but they’ve been published, and they’ve been presented where a substantial number of people can get an oral inhibitor to a KRAS mutation and get clinical benefit. Now those are just the first ones; they’ve been presented. There have actually been Phase III trials now that are near completion of the first of those. The dogma we always say is that the first is just the beginning, right? So, we’re optimistic that that one will be helpful, and maybe even get FDA-approved.
But there will be many more coming. We actually, in our center, have eight or nine different trials that are in different stages of opening and enrolling from companies that are exploring how to target this mutation effectively, and how to combine it with other things. A tremendous amount of excitement and promise. It will take years, probably, to do all these trials. So, we hope we’ll have some approved within the next year. But in the next few years, I think we’ll learn a lot more.
That’s one target. There are other targets, as well, and there are other things that have also shown very exciting results in targeting pancreatic cancer. So, we’re really optimistic that we’re going to be able to identify a larger and larger group of patients with what are called targetable mutations and be able to change the course of their disease.
Jamie Forward:
Yeah. Can you talk a little bit about how targeted therapies work?
Dr. Paul Oberstein:
Yeah. So, targeted therapy can mean a lot of things.
So, it doesn’t always mean one thing. But that idea behind targeted therapy, is that if we can identify a specific alteration or mutation in a tumor, we can then selectively target the tumor and not the rest of the body. And sometimes you can do that with different modalities such as pills that are called small molecules. There are other things, things like vaccines that might have a role in targeting specific mutations, and other treatments. But the idea behind it is that if we can learn something that’s unique to the tumor, or tumors, and target them; we can get better killing of the tumor with less or fewer side effects and longer response to therapy.