They call him the “silent killer”: he knows how to hide well, he avoids artillery to neutralize him and when he shows his face, it is usually too late.. Pancreatic cancer is the most lethal tumor: life expectancy at the time of diagnosis does not reach five months and just the 7% patients survive five years. In the last 40 years, scientific advances have been irregular, with more setbacks than success, and prognosis and survival have barely been improved. It is the thorn in the side of researchers, admits Núria Malats, head of the Genetic and Molecular Epidemiology Group at the National Cancer Research Center (CNIO), who has been searching for risk factors for 15 years: “Pancreatic cancer kills patients. and also the research career of scientists, although this scenario is changing,” he points out. Without early detection mechanisms and with the majority of diagnoses in advanced stages of the disease, chemotherapy continues to be the great weapon in the fight against a tumor that still resists the challenges of promising immunotherapy and other targeted treatments.
