Adam Wolfe, MD, PhD

Personalizing Radiation Treatments for Pancreatic Cancer Patients

Adam Wolfe, MD, PhD, and his team at The Ohio State University conducted research to help personalize treatments for patients with pancreatic cancer. With the lowest five-year survival rate of all the major cancers, new solutions that help determine the treatments that are the best for each individual patient with pancreatic cancer are needed to improve outcomes.

Dr. Wolfe made significant progress toward identifying which pancreatic cancer patients could benefit the most from radiation therapy following surgery using a new molecular signature that they discovered and is made up of microRNAs found in blood and tumor tissue samples. Their preliminary findings showed that this innovative biomarker can predict which of these patients are at high risk for the cancer to recur locally or regionally near the original site of the tumor and which patients are at high risk for the cancer to metastasize and appear in more distant locations in the body. Prior studies have shown that radiation therapy following surgery improves local-regional control of pancreatic cancer, but many patients also experience side effects. Patients with a molecular signature showing they are at high risk for local-regional recurrence could make informed treatment decisions about radiation therapy while those at risk for metastatic disease could be spared the side-effects as well as the time and cost of treatment.

With the ROI grant, Dr. Wolfe and his team:

• Validated the molecular signature to determine if it could predict for local-regional recurrence in an independent dataset using samples from two other institutions.
• Examined whether microRNA-296 increases cell death following radiation in cell and mouse models, which if successfully demonstrated, could eventually be used to identify the patients with pancreatic cancer that could benefit the most from radiation therapy.
• Investigated other novel miRNA signatures that could further optimize treatment for patients with pancreatic cancer.  

Dr. Wolfe and his team made important strides toward improving outcomes for patients with pancreatic cancer by developing new tools to help ensure that the patients who could benefit from radiation therapy receive it. Eventually, oncologists could use the molecular signature to select patients who would benefit the most from radiation therapy, and a targeted miRNA could be developed into a novel therapy to enhance radiation response.

Dr. Wolfe is continuing his explorations of miRNA molecular signatures to provide more personalized care for patients with pancreatic cancer as a Clinical Research KL2 Scholar at his new institution, the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences.  

Publications

• A microRNA-Based Signature Predicts Local-Regional Failure and Overall Survival After Pancreatic Cancer Resection was published in the March 10, 2020, issue of Oncotarget. 

Presentations

• Discovery of a Novel Driver of Radioresistance in Pancreatic Cancer (PC) Using Genome-Wide RNA-Seq was presented at the 2022 ASTRO Annual Meeting. 
• A KRAS-RAD18-miR-296-3p Regulated Network Mediates Radioresistance in Pancreatic Cancer Through Homologous Recombination was presented at the 2020 ASTRO Annual Meeting.