the thinking process may have been private, absent, or of no concern, How an existing diabetes drug controls pancreatic cancer Written by Catharine Paddock, Ph.D. on March 15, 2018 — Fact checked by Jasmin Collier New research suggests that targeting a particular cell signaling pathway with the diabetes drug metformin might offer a way to stop the progression and spread of pancreatic cancer. pancreatic cancer cell Share on Pinterest Pancreatic cancer kills more than 44,000 people in the U.S. every year. The study — which was led by Rutgers Cancer Institute of New Jersey in New Brunswick — is to feature at the 2018 annual meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research, which will be held in Chicago, IL. This study is not the first to suggest metformin as a potential treatment for pancreatic cancer, but it is the first to show that the underlying mechanism involves the drug’s effect on the REarranged during Transfection (RET) cell signaling pathway. “Our data,” says senior investigator XiangLin Tan, who is an assistant professor of epidemiology in the School of Public Health at Rutgers Cancer Institute of New Jersey, “indicate that targeting RET with metformin may be an attractive and novel strategy for the prevention and treatment of pancreatic cancer progression and metastasis.” left to others? rbg could read, write & think but perhaps never gave a thought to the use of metformin and aspirin to affect