New strategy against pancreatic cancer: combining radiotherapy with nanoparticle-generated hyperthermia

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The Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), an agency affiliated with the Ministry of Science, Innovation, and Universities of Spain, is leading an international project that will create a new strategy against pancreatic cancer, one of the most resistant tumors to radiotherapy. The goal is to combine radiotherapy with hyperthermia (treatment using highly localized heat) and nanoparticles. The expected results could help improve patient quality of life and reduce healthcare costs.

"We've seen that individual strategies are already effective. We're familiar with the treatments, and therefore, we believe that combining them would be beneficial for this type of treatment," explains Ana Espinosa, a CSIC researcher at the Materials Science Institute of Madrid and the coordinator of the project.

The CSIC scientist has extensive experience studying cancer treatments based on hyperthermia, a therapy that attacks tumor cells by increasing their temperature using externally activated nanoparticles. In the clinical setting, hyperthermia often accompanies radiation and chemotherapy in cancer treatment. "Its use with heat-generating nanoparticles (in the range of one billionth of a meter) offers multiple advantages," says Espinosa.

Pancreatic cancer is considered an "immunologically cold tumor" because it has certain characteristics that hinder an effective immune response against cancer cells, explains Espinosa: "This type of cancer has a very low survival rate and is very difficult to treat," says the researcher, who explains that, by nature, cancer cells "hide from the immune system and prevent effective treatments."

Unlike "hot" tumors, which typically exhibit high levels of immune cell infiltration and response, "pancreatic tumors create a hostile environment that evades immune therapy," says Espinosa, who explains that this type of tumor creates a "hypoxic and immunosuppressive tumor microenvironment (TME)," meaning it exhibits a high resistance to radiation therapy.

XPANTHER

The project, titled ‘Radiothermal-driven immune activation to tackle pancreatic hypoxic tumors’ (XPANTHER), seeks to integrate hyperthermic radiotherapy with innovative nanoparticle-based treatments in in vitro models: “Each element contributes in a way when it comes to attacking the tumor,” says Espinosa. “The goal is to advance nanoparticle-based treatments, improving the therapeutic advantages over conventional methods for potentially precise and personalized cancer treatment. To do this, we will use advanced in vitro models that allow us to recreate the tumor microenvironment,” she explains. In addition, this research also explores the advanced characterization of these systems using synchrotron radiation-based X-ray spectroscopy.

XPANTHER has a total funding of approximately €800,000 through the TRANSCAN-3 network, which promotes cancer research through European and international cooperation, in this case on translational cancer research. In Spain, this project is funded by the Carlos III Health Institute and the Scientific Foundation of the Spanish Association Against Cancer.

This project, led by the ICMM-CSIC, involves entities from Spain (CSIC and the Health Research Institute of the Hospital Clínico San Carlos), France (Institut Curie and Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique and Inserm U1148 Sorbonne Paris Nord University and Avicenne Hospital) and Slovenia (Slovak Academy of Sciences).