{"doi":"10.3390/cancers13225781","title":"Dramatic Reduction of Distant Pancreatic Metastases Using Local Light Activation of Verteporfin with Nab-Paclitaxel","abstract":"Despite substantial drug development efforts, pancreatic adenocarcinoma (PDAC) remains a difficult disease to treat, and surgical resection is the only potentially curative option. Unfortunately, 80% of patients are ineligible for surgery due to the presence of invasive disease and/or distant metastases at the time of diagnosis. Treatment strategies geared towards reclassifying these patients as surgical candidates by reducing metastatic burden represents the most promising approach to improve long-term survival. We describe a photodynamic therapy (PDT) based approach that, in combination with the first-line chemotherapeutic nab-paclitaxel, effectively addresses distant metastases in three separate orthotopic PDAC models in immunodeficient mice. In addition to effectively controlling local tumor growth, PDT plus nab-paclitaxel primes the tumor to elicit systemic effects and reduce or abrogate metastases. This combination dramatically inhibits (up to 100%) the eventual development of metastases in models of early stage PDAC, and completely eliminates metastasis in 55% of animals with already established distant disease in late-stage models. Our findings suggest that this light activation process initiates local biological and/or physiological changes within the tumor microenvironment that can be leveraged to treat both localized and distant disease, and potentially reclassify patients with previously inoperable disease as surgical candidates.","journal":"Cancers","year":2021,"id":185917,"datarank":0.29188652235829704,"base_score":1.9459101490553132,"endowment":1.9459101490553132,"self_citation_contribution":0.29188652235829704,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.29188652235829704,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":6,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9531,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2021-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":743128,"name":"Zhiming Mai","orcid":"0000-0002-7819-9860","position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":355354,"name":"Sriram Anbil","orcid":"0000-0002-3368-2445","position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":743129,"name":"Myung‐Gyu Choi","orcid":"0000-0003-4083-5187","position":3,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":233045,"name":"Kenneth Wang","orcid":"0000-0003-4645-9346","position":4,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":355356,"name":"Edward V. Maytin","orcid":"0000-0002-3690-8382","position":5,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":250016,"name":"Brian W. Pogue","orcid":"0000-0002-9887-670X","position":6,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":233099,"name":"Tayyaba Hasan","orcid":"0000-0003-0871-6057","position":7,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":233096,"name":"Michael Pigula","orcid":"0000-0001-6121-9995","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":32,"raw_metadata":{"citation_network_status":"fetched"},"created_at":"2026-07-18T23:48:42.632147Z","pmid":"34830934","pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}