A researcher managed to turn cancerous pancreatic cells into normal cells.

Feedback they receive from patients suffering from pancreatic adenocarcinoma, the most common form of cancer affecting the body, are not very optimistic. In general, doctors informed that most patients had lived for around six months.

However, in a new study, researchers that pancreatic adenocarcinoma cells can be “persuaded” to turn back into healthy cells, a discovery that could lead to the development of a new treatment.

“For the first time we have showed that overexpression of a gene can reduce the potential of a tumor promotion in pancreatic adenocarcinoma cells, but also to reverse the cell to its original state,” said Pamela Itkin-Ansari author of the study.

“Pancreatic cancer cells have a genetic memory we hope to exploit”, she added.

The team of scientists at Sanford-Burnham, UC San Diego and Purdue University has started to increase pancreatic cancer cells in laboratory cell that caused them to produce larger quantities E47 protein. This is linked to a specific sequence of DNA that control genes involved in growth and differentiation. The result of this experiment was that the cells stopped growing and started to turn back into normal cells.

The main reason behind pancreatic cancer being fatal for most patients is the stage of the disease is discovered. Symptoms such as weight loss, abdominal pain and, jaundice occur when tumors have reached a considerable size, and the disease may have already spread in the body.