The three-year study is under way thanks to a $600,000 grant from the Louise Davie Charitable Trust and it could be the first step towards developing an early blood-based diagnostic test for pancreatic cancer.
Mrs Davie, a highly respected member of the Dunedin Hospital’s gastroenterology team for the final 20 years of her long nursing career, died in late December 2022 after suffering from the deadly disease for two and a-half years.
The trust was created in her honour the following year with the sole aim of funding research into earlier diagnoses of the cancer that was too often detected too late.
Mrs Davie’s husband, Steve Davie, said the launch of the research project and the first major grant from the trust was bittersweet.
"She worked for 20 years in the gastro department here," Mr Davie said.
"She saw first-hand the carnage of pancreatic cancer.
"We talked about it in her last few months of life and decided that we needed to do something to try and get research under way.
"So she would be smiling today. She'd have a twinkle in her eye."
University of Otago pathology associate professor Aniruddha Chatterjee, who is leading the study, said he and others at the Dunedin School of Medicine, believed DNA methylation markers, or instruction codes, in blood samples could be used to detect pancreatic cancer far sooner than the disease was picked up now.
Pancreatic cancer was deadly, Assoc Prof Chatterjee said.
"The outcome is very, very poor - mainly due to the late diagnosis of the cancer,"
The cancer spread aggressively through the body and by the time it was detected it had often spread from the pancreas to other organs.
Surgically removing a tumour typically offered the best hope, but because the cancer was usually detected only once it had spread, surgery was generally no longer an option.
But there was evidence that before the cancer could be picked up in a scan, the DNA markers researchers were studying were changing, Assoc Prof Chatterjee said.
The pathology work under way was being supported by local partners - clinician-researchers Dr Jim Smith, Dr Nicholas Fischer, Prof Chris Jackson, and senior epigenetics scientist Dr Euan Rodger.
Assoc Prof Chatterjee had also enlisted teams in Australia, India, Belgium, the Netherlands, Switzerland and Austria.
A new cutting-edge method would be used to map the DNA markers in blood samples from hundreds of patients.
The data which that work provided would then be analysed with machine learning and artificial intelligence-based tools to bring out "the most sensitive and specific patterns" that could one day allow researchers to develop a test for the disease, he said.
In a statement, the trust said only around 10% of patients diagnosed with pancreatic cancer were eligible for surgery and survival rates remained "wretchedly low".
The trust’s funding would allow the research team to expand the technology to monitor disease progression, guide treatment choices, and detect early relapse, improving both survival and quality of life for patients, the statement said.
The five-year survival rate for pancreatic cancer was under 10% and fewer than 20% of patients lived another 12 months after diagnosis.
