And are there different types of pancreatic cancer?

Yes, there are two common types and the normal pancreas cells do two things. they’re involved in digestion, generating enzymes that help to break up our food. Or they’re also involved in hormone production, in particular insulin.

Now each of those different functions are generated by different cells of the pancreas, and if those cells go wrong they create different types of pancreatic cancer. The common one, we know as pancreatic adenocarcinoma is the one associated with the cells associated with our digestive system. And that’s a particularly aggressive type of cancer.

Another one which is less common we call pancreatic neuroendocrine cancer, and this tumour arises from cells that seem to have an hormonal function, sometimes generating the insulin, so you can form things like insulinomas, but sometimes actually arising from other hormonal cells, both in the pancreas and in other parts of the body, whose function we don’t fully understand. But these tumours we call neuroendocrine carcinomas and they tend to have a less aggressive pattern of behaviour. And it’s important to know which type you have because you treat them very differently.

So cells in the body are continually growing and dying, and they have to be replenished normally. And so the cells normally grow and divide under a very controlled process, but sometimes that controlled process goes wrong and uncontrolled growth leads to cancer. And this can happen in any organ of the body, such as the pancreas, and generate what we know as pancreatic cancer.