Biobank of tumor tissue and advanced molecular profiling steer researchers toward new targeted therapies
Other than a fleeting moment in high school when she thought about becoming a pianist, Eileen Carpenter, M.D., Ph.D., has always had a career in science and medicine in her sights.
Eileen Carpenter, M.D., Ph.D.
Photo credit: Erica Bass
The daughter of a computer scientist and pharmaceutical research scientist, Carpenter had an early interest in science. But it was the untimely death of her mother, Lydia, to metastatic pancreatic cancer as Carpenter was starting high school that inspired her educational path and life’s work.
Now, Carpenter is a gastroenterologist who specializes in diseases of the pancreas. She sees patients at Rogel and the VA Ann Arbor Health System.
She also leads a translational research laboratory that studies pancreatic cancer at the molecular level—how it develops, metastasizes and eventually becomes resistant to therapy. Their goal is to identify new therapeutic targets and strategies to overcome chemoresistance so patients may live longer, healthier lives.
While much scientific progress has been made against the relatively rare disease—in the U.S., 1.7 percent of people will be diagnosed in their lifetime—the 5-year survival rate is only 12.8%, according to the National Cancer Institute.
About 90% of pancreatic cancers arise from precancerous lesions called pancreatic intraepithelial neoplasias, or PanINs, Carpenter says. Too tiny to be detected by traditional imaging techniques in clinical care, they can only be easily studied in resected pancreas tissue in the lab.
“We have found that PanINs are prevalent in most of the healthy population,” Carpenter says. “We all have them, but pancreatic cancer is relatively rare, so there must be something in these PanINs that triggers the progression to cancer.”
“That’s what we’re trying to uncover.”