New Cell Therapy Improves Pancreatic Cancer Survival
Cystic adenocarcinoma (marked in red) of the pancreas (outlined in green). Contrast‑enhanced computed tomography image.
MBq Disk Bew on Wikimedia Commons
A new immune cell therapy offers real hope for people with pancreatic cancer, a disease that has seen little progress and leaves most patients with only months to live. For decades, survival rates have barely changed, leaving patients and families with few real options. One of the latest immunotherapies, called CAR T, could change that story. It works by training a patient’s own immune cells to hunt down and attack cancer.
As described in my book, CAR T: A New Cure for Cancer, Autoimmune and Inherited Disease, these advances in immune cell therapy are changing the future of cancer care. This breakthrough for pancreatic cancer could shift what patients can expect from treatment, bringing genuine hope where it’s long been needed.
Why Pancreatic Cancer Is Hard to Treat
Pancreatic cancer starts in the pancreas, an organ that helps with digestion and blood sugar control. Most cases are found late, when the cancer has already spread, making it hard to treat. When surgery is not an option, treatment usually involves several chemotherapy drugs, but even with treatment, most people live less than a year after diagnosis.
CAR T acts by using a person’s own immune cells, collected from the blood, trained to recognize cancer cells, and then returned to the body. CAR T has been mostly effective against blood cancers. It is much harder to use in solid tumors like pancreatic cancer.
Pancreatic tumors form thick walls of tissue and develop abnormal blood vessels that block immune cells from entering. The cancer cells also lack clear targets for immune cells to recognize, and sometimes healthy cells look too similar to cancer cells. This makes it difficult for immune cell therapy to reach and target only the cancer, increasing the risk of harming healthy tissue.
Tumor cells in solid cancers can also evolve and lose the markers targeted by therapy. This allows them to evade immune detection. Due to these barriers, these cell therapies often do not work as well for pancreatic cancer as they do for other cancers.
A New Way to Fight Pancreatic Cancer
A new twist on CAR T therapy aims to address these problems by engineering immune cells to target multiple antigens simultaneously—known as a dual-antigen or multi-antigen approach. This approach targets markers, including PRAME, SSX2, MAGEA4, NY‑ESO‑1 and Survivin, expressed by many pancreatic cancer cells. By targeting these five markers, the CAR T cells are more likely to find and attack the cancer, even if the tumor tries to hide.
The new immune cell therapy is under investigation in a clinical trial. In this approach, patient-derived immune cells are engineered to recognize the five antigens found mainly on pancreatic cancer cells. Lab analysis shows that most tumors express at least two of these antigens, increasing the chance that therapy remains effective if a tumor loses one target.
CT scans of two patients with metastatic pancreatic cancer at baseline and several months after treatment with the multiantigen‑targeted T cells, showing shrinkage of primary pancreatic tumors and distant liver and lymph node metastases highlighted in yellow.
Reprinted from Bear AS, et al. Autologous multiantigen-targeted T cell therapy for pancreatic cancer: a phase 1/2 trial. Nature Medicine. 2026;30:xxx–xxx (figure panels showing CT scans at baseline and post-treatment), with permission from Springer Nature.
Early results are promising, and the treatment appears safe. This clinical trial is in its initial stages. It seems patients live longer than with standard treatments, and that levels of tumor-seeking T cells remain high post-treatment. This immune cell therapy is also being tested with other treatments, including chemotherapy and agents that help immune cells enter tumors.
What’s Next for Cancer Treatment
In the future, the therapy may be tailored more closely to each patient’s cancer, potentially improving effectiveness and reducing side effects. Larger studies are needed to determine if this approach improves survival and to identify which patients benefit most. So far, results exceed initial expectations and suggest that new options may become available for pancreatic cancer.
By targeting multiple tumor-associated markers at once, immune cells make it harder for cancer to evade detection. For patients with limited options, this approach is a significant step forward and may lay the groundwork for future innovations.
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