• Pancreatic cancer is the fourth leading cause of cancer death in both men and women.
• About 15% of all pancreatic cancer tumours are resectable.
• Stage IV pancreatic cancer has a five-year survival rate of 1 percent.
• OncoSil Medical is changing the way we treat pancreatic cancer.

In Europe, pancreatic cancer is currently the seventh most common type of cancer but ranks as the fourth highest cause of death, just after lung, colorectal, and breast cancers. Experts believe that by 2030, it could become the second deadliest cancer. However, there's good news: the way we understand and fight this disease is starting to change.

Cancer Treatments Using Nuclear Medicine

ASX listed OncoSil Medical has a product named OncoSil. OncoSil is based on a radioactive isotope, called Phosphorus 32, which goes into a nuclear reactor and creates beta radiation.

OncoSil Medical is extremely similar to Sirtex medical. Sirtex uses radioactive isotopes, Yttrium 90, for liver cancer treatment. However, the principle and activism is the same here - they are placing the radiation in the cancer tumour, that is generally relatively difficult to deliver with typical beam radiation.

The Problem

If you think of a patient that is going through cancer treatment, the patient typically goes through chemotherapy, surgery, radiation therapy and immunotherapy. With these options, the radiation therapy needs to go through other critical organs. There is all kinds of collateral damage with these types of radiation. It is however relatively easy to do radiation therapy on a tumour that is located externally or on the outer side of the body and organs.

This was the problem for liver cancer, which was Sirtex Medical, and for pancreatic cancer, which is OncoSil Medical. When you think of where the pancreas are located, there are all these organs surrounding it. You can’t necessarily give proper radiation therapy such as external beam radiation therapy - This is when nuclear medicine really takes advantage.

The Solution

Oncosil Medical provides an injection of a sticky radioactive fluid that is injected straight into the pancreatic tumour. This kind of radiation is called beta radiation. The maximum the radioactive fluid goes is one centimetre in diameter.

When the healthcare professional injects this radioactive fluid, the result of it is localised. This means that it only gives the radiation at the point that it is injected and there is no other collateral damage to all of the other organs, in relation if you were performing external beam radiation on the patient.

The Benefits

• 70% less pain medication is required.
• 25% of patients go through curative therapy, because they can go through surgery to be cured from cancer.
• Instead of 6 months, patients can live for 10 or more years longer.

The benefit that OncoSil Medical provides pancreatic cancer sufferers is that you can give a very high concentrated dose directly to the tumour, destroy the tumour and reduce the size of the tumour - which is the ultimate added benefit.

The Outcomes

The outcome of the OncoSil treatment is that patients are able to use 70% less pain medication, because the tumour is not pressing against the patients back. The patients do not have to take opioids or such and 25% of the patients that go through this, can go back to what is called curative - this means that the patients can be cured of the pancreatic cancer, because they can now go through surgery.

The reason why this has been made possible is that the size of the tumour would have been reduced and the surgeon can go on later and cut that part of the pancreatic tumour out. Patients who have been given only 6 months to live, are now able to live for up to 5 to 10 years or more.

That is the real benefit of using OncoSil from the ASX listed OncoSil Medical.