Zebrabiores helps to get a deep understanding of pancreatic cancer using zebrafish model
Pancreatic cancer, specifically pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC), its nowadays one of the pancreatic tumors with the worst prognostic. It represents the fourth cause of death due to cancer, with a survival rate of 7-9% within the next 5 years since the diagnostic.
One of the factors that could explain this high mortality rate in this type of cancer and the inneficiency of the therapies applied to treat it, according to the researchers, would be one specific type of cancer cells known as cancer stem cells (CSC's). These cells are plastic and they have carcinogenic properties, apart from being chemoresistant and metastatic.
Zebrabiores group from the Veterinary Faculty (USC, Lugo) has participated providing the zebrafish as an in vivo model during the last 3 years in the research published in Nature Communications addressing the study of this type of cells in collaboration with the main group of the paper leaded by Dr. Bruno Sainz Anding (Instituto de Investigaciones Biomédicas "Alberto Sols" CSIC-UAM, Department of Cancer Biology) - https://sainzlab.com/