Team of UB-Led Researchers Target Pancreatic Cancer With Light-Infused Chemotherapy

A few factors account for this. One is that the tumors hide within fibrous tissue in the pancreas, which makes it difficult for chemotherapy drugs to penetrate.

Jonathan F. Lovell, PhD, professor of biomedical engineering at the University at Buffalo, is working on a smarter and more effective way to deliver chemotherapy as an intervention in metastatic pancreatic cancer.

The Department of Engineering is a joint program between the Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences and the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.

Lovell and his small research team found that inserting tiny light-emitting fibers directly into an irradiated tumor activates the drug where it’s needed most. This method overcomes another factor that makes pancreatic tumors so stubborn — their location deep within the body.  

“One reason this type of cancer is so tough is that pancreatic tumors don’t have many blood vessels. That makes it hard to get enough medicine into them,” Lovell said. “We demonstrate that light-infused chemotherapy can reach these tumors and shrink them.”

Lovell was recently awarded a five-year, $2.53 million award from the National Cancer Institute for the research project, “Interstitial Chemophototherapy (I-CPT) as an Intervention in Locally Advanced Pancreatic Cancer.”

The other principal investigators are Tracy Liu, PhD, assistant professor of microbiology, immunology and cell biology at West Virginia University School of Medicine, and Gal Shafirstein, DSc, director of photodynamic therapy (PDT) clinical research at Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center. Shafirstein has long specialized in inserting fiber optic fibers into tumors for phototherapy treatment.

For years, cancer researchers have known that tiny fat-based particles called liposomes deliver chemotherapy to treat advanced pancreatic cancer. Lovell and his team improved this delivery system by adding a special ingredient called porphyrin-phospholipid (PoP), which makes the liposomes sensitive to light. Because shining light from outside the body doesn’t work well for deep tumors, they used I-CPT.

In their laboratory experiments, they found this technique to be 10 times more effective than current methods in treating mice with pancreatic cancer. When combined with immunotherapy, specifically PD-1 blockers, this method even cured some of the mice.

When these liposomes are injected into the bloodstream, nothing leaks out. But when doctors shine a light on the tumor — after the liposomes have arrived — the liposomes break open and release the chemo right at the tumor site. This way the tumor gets a much higher dose of the drug while sparing the rest of the body from side effects, Lovell explained.

“A few years ago, we found that this PoP approach is promising for pancreatic cancer by modifying an already approved drug, Onivyde,” he said. “Now we plan to tackle new practical issues like how it will be applied to large difficult to resect tumors and how the immune system gets involved.”

Lovell, who has been working for years on developing more effective drug delivery systems, is the co-founder of POP Biotechnologies, Inc., a Buffalo-based startup that commercializes technology created in his UB lab.

He and his team are now applying for a grant from the National Institutes of Health to continue developing this treatment and test it in more realistic cancer models, such as ones grown from actual patient tumors in rats. They want to study how the drug spreads in the body and how the treatment affects tumors and the immune system.

“This method shows promise for treating pancreatic cancer more effectively and could potentially lead to better survival rates in the future,” he said. “We would like to eventually bring it to human trials. Hopefully, the data we get in this research will establish the benefit. I am excited to work with Dr. Liu and Dr. Shafirstein for this team effort.”