SGER: Biophotonics for Diagnosis of Pancreatic Cancer

Northwestern University, Evanston IL

Investigators

Abstract

CBET-0733868 Backman Pancreatic cancer (PC) has the worst prognosis of any major cancer, with a five-year survival rate below 5%. The reasons for the lethality of PC relates to its tendency to be diagnosed at a late stage given that potentially curable stages of disease are often clinically silent. Survival rate dramatically depends on the stage at which PC is diagnosed. However, pancreatic cancer is insidious in that the development of symptoms generally portend unresectable and hence uncurable disease. One of the major hurdles preventing screening for PC is that essentially any interrogation of the pancreas may lead to serious complications (~20% complication rate). Thus, finding a pre-screening method in which patients are risk-stratified would be critical for designing screening strategies. This project focuses on development of a biophotonics approach (a partial wave spectroscopic microscopic technique), to address this problem.