Scott Verbridge, associate professor in biomedical engineering and mechanics at Virginia Tech, and Barath Udayasuryan, an alumnus from the Virginia Tech-Wake Forest University School of Biomedical Engineering and Sciences, have discovered a characteristic of a common oral bacterium that relocates to pancreatic cancer tumors which may help guide future therapeutic interventions for treatment.
Precancerous pancreatic lesions and some pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma tumors harboring KRAS mutations had higher-than-normal expression of the FGFR2 protein, and FGFR2 inactivation delayed KRAS-mutated PDAC development in mice, according to results of a study published in Cancer Research, a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research.
