BIRMINGHAM, Ala. – A potentially potent treatment for the most lethal of cancers, pancreatic, may be passing under the noses of people eating food flavored with Indian curry spice.

University of Alabama at Birmingham researchers are exploring the possibility that curcumin, which is found naturally in the spice, may inhibit the growth of pancreatic cancer and greatly increase its susceptibility to chemotherapy .

But it’s a little more complicated than heading out to an Indian restaurant for a double order of chicken curry.

Mei Wan, a cellular pathologist at UAB, outlined the project this week during a research update before the American Cancer Society in Alabama, which is funding much of the work.

Wan, co-investigator on the research along with another UAB cellular pathologist, Xu Cao, said the project started by looking at pancreatic cancer cells and noticing that a tumor suppresser called SMAD4 was missing. The main suspect was a protein called JAB1, which they found in excess.

Lab researchers started searching for something to inhibit the production of JAB1, hoping that by eliminating this protein, they would enhance the body’s natural ability to fight off cancer with SMAD4.

They tried many things, and discovered the most effective JAB1 inhibitor was curcumin, which is found in Indian curry spice. They were excited for many reasons.

For one thing, curcumin is a natural product, making it easy to work with in trials with animals and humans. “It’s quite safe and it’s not toxic,” Wan said.

But another reason for excitement was the lack of treatments for pancreatic cancer, a disease that kills 99 percent of patients who have it, most of them within a year of diagnosis. About 35,000 Americans die annually from pancreatic cancer.

While curcumin showed promise in the lab, there have been problems getting it into a form that could be used as a drug. It’s not soluble in water, which makes it difficult to inject, and it has a short half-life, meaning that it is expelled from the body before it has a chance to really do its work.

So researchers worked with chemists to create a conjugate to deliver curcumin by extending its half-life.

The result was a new experimental drug called PEG-curcumin, and it is now being tested in mice. “It works really well,” Wan said.

Lab tests have also shown that PEG-curcumin greatly enhances one of the few existing treatments for pancreatic cancer, the chemotherapy agent gemcitabine, and creates a cocktail that is even more promising than PEG-curcumin alone. “There’s a kind of synergistic effect,” Wan said.

Of course, many things can go wrong in the development of any drug. This one hasn’t even started human trials, although they will likely be greatly simplified because curcumin appears to be safe and there are so many hopelessly ill pancreatic cancer patients.

Still, getting a new Food and Drug Administration-approved treatment to pancreatic cancer patients could be many years off, and money will determine how fast the process moves.

Wan said it’s always been difficult to get research money for pancreatic cancer, with the National Cancer Institute dedicating only 1 percent of its budget to the disease. Pancreatic cancer is so swift and lethal that there really aren’t any patients alive to advocate for funding.

“All the patients die really quickly and nobody speaks for this,” Wan said.

PH END PARKS

(Dave Parks is a staff writer for the Birmingham (Ala.) News. He can be contacted at dparks(at)bhamnews.com.)

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