Investigating Mechanisms of Resistance to Gemcitabine in Pancreatic Cancer

One of the problems associated with the use of chemotherapy is that cancers can develop resistance to certain chemotherapeutic agents. This means that the cancer cells no longer respond to the use of the chemotherapeutic agents and will continue to grow, resulting in progression of the patient’s condition. One way in which this problem can be tackled is to develop new drugs to which cancers are less likely to become resistant. To do this requires an understanding of the mechanism behind how this resistance develops. This is what my project will be investigating, more specifically, to investigate the mechanisms of resistance of a drug used to treat pancreatic cancer: gemcitabine.