Pancreatic cancer is too often deadly but a new device may help patients withstand large doses of the highly toxic drugs needed to treat the disease, a preliminary study suggests.

It is estimated that 40,560 deaths will occur from pancreatic cancer this year, which is the fourth leading cause of cancer death.  Surgically removing a tumor is currently the best chance of cure but only 15 percent of patients have operable tumors. This means that high doses of toxic drugs are often the only option, but some patients cannot withstand their side effects.

Now researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill doing experiments with mice find that an implantable device can deliver a particularly toxic cocktail of drugs directly to the tumors. This can stunt their growth or in some cases, shrink them – while the rest of the body would be spared the adverse side effects.

The drug cocktail is a combination of four chemotherapy drugs that has been shown to shrink tumors or halt their growth in nearly a third of pancreatic cancer patients. It’s one of today’s first-line treatments for pancreatic cancer, but it is not suitable for all patients due to its degree of toxicity when delivered through the bloodstream, the researchers say.

“The beauty of this device is that all of the drug delivery is focused locally, with low delivery to the rest of the body,” said James D. Byrne, Ph.D., the lead author of the paper, which appears in Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.  “If this works in humans, we hope the device can be used as a plug-and-play approach to delivering the latest, most promising drug regimens for patients who have a dire need for new and better treatments,” he added.