The survival rate for pancreatic cancer is very low – just 10% of patients live more than 5 years after their diagnosis.

But with your purchase of the Canadian Cancer Society (CCS)’s Gift of Discovery, CCS-funded researcher Dr Rama Khokha and her team are working to develop new treatments for this aggressive and hard-to-treat cancer. By using tiny, lab-grown pancreatic tumours developed from patients’ tumour samples, they hope to better understand a tumour’s microenvironment – allowing them to test potential treatments.

Once the lab-grown tumour responds positively to a treatment, the successful therapy can then be applied to real-life patients – improving their outcomes.

“Cancer is one of the biggest challenges in medicine,” says Dr Khokha. “I am proud to be developing new paths to cancer treatment, as well as training a stream of highly qualified next-gen researchers.”