Pancreatic cancer is so deadly in part because it walls itself off from radiation and chemotherapy. An amped-up version of vitamin D can break down those walls, new research shows. Pancreatic cancer is arguably the worst cancer diagnosis anyone can receive. It has the highest death rate of any type of cancer at 94 percent. Neither radiation nor chemotherapy is effective against pancreatic tumors. That makes the discovery of a promising new treatment that’s nearly as simple as a home remedy, described today in the journal Cell, all the more amazing. The treatment is a souped-up version of vitamin D, delivered by injection. Learn More About Pancreatic Cancer and How It’s Diagnosed »

Pancreas Puts Tumors Into a ‘Living Safe’ The science of pancreatic cancer lags behind that of other types of cancer, partly because the disease has only become common in recent years. Looking at how the cancer works at the molecular level, researchers at the Salk Institute near San Diego, California, found that, in an effort to contain the cancer, the pancreas walls it off with dense, inflamed tissue. Read More: 7 Surprising Benefits of Vitamin D » “The pancreas is building a safe around the tumor. It’s reasonably successful for doing that for a while, but drugs cannot get to the tumor because it’s being protected by this living safe,” said Ronald Evans, director of the Gene Expression Laboratory at the Salk Institute and the paper’s senior author. Evans and his colleagues wanted to figure out how to break into the safe. They discovered that the cells that make up the living safe, called stellate cells, had high levels of a particular vitamin D receptor. Introducing the vitamin could return them to their normal, more pliant state. But regular vitamin D supplements weren’t up to the task: It took a powerful synthetic derivative to crack the safe. Mice with pancreatic tumors that were treated with the modified vitamin D along with anti-cancer drugs lived 50 percent longer than those that got just the drugs. “It’s one of the reasons that this approach has come a little bit out of left field, because people had tried vitamin D, but they tried regular vitamin D and that simply does not have the power or the impact to get you where you want to go fast enough,” Evans said.