CONTACT US
PanCAN’s Early Detection Initiative (EDI) has reached an important milestone: The study has enrolled all the patients necessary to move on to the next stage of this groundbreaking work that explores the connection between new-onset diabetes and pancreatic cancer.
As of the end of January 2025, more than 8,800 participants who meet the eligibility criteria have been enrolled in the study. All participants will be followed for three years for final data study collection.
“We’re grateful to all the study participants who are contributing their time to this important work – and we’re thankful for our PanCAN donors who make this study possible,” said PanCAN Chief Science Advisor Lynn Matrisian, PhD, MBA. “We are committed to our long-standing goal to advance an early detection strategy for pancreatic cancer. The EDI study is critical to help get us there.”
While there have been large-scale pancreatic cancer early detection research efforts that have focused on people at high risk due to family history or genetic changes, the EDI study focuses on new-onset diabetes, a symptom that is often overlooked for pancreatic cancer.
This is important because research suggests that in a small subset of people diagnosed with diabetes after the age of 50, their diabetes was caused by a pancreatic tumor. In these cases, increases in blood sugar levels can be observed as early as three years before a pancreatic cancer diagnosis, giving patients and their healthcare team a critical window to monitor and potentially detect pancreatic cancer. Because of this, participants in the EDI study will be followed for three years to determine whether they are diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and at what stage.
The EDI study also looks at the method of detection. In a subgroup of participants, the study examines whether imaging at the time of new-onset diabetes may lead to earlier diagnosis of pancreatic cancer. Ultimately, the goal is for the study results to help develop a screening method to detect pancreatic cancer when it can be surgically removed.
“Too many patients are diagnosed too late, when surgery is no longer an option,” said Matrisian. “We know that patients identified at the earliest stage of disease can have a five-year survival rate of 44% up to 80%. We need more people in this category to continue to improve outcomes.”
Along with PanCAN’s EDI investigators and clinical sites, Baylor College of Medicine and Kaiser Permanente Southern California, the goal is to publish findings at several timepoints to share results with the scientific and clinical community.
EDI collaborators have already published several studies contributing new knowledge to the field, including a 2024 article focused on identifying high-risk patients for screening, a 2022 pilot study exploring pancreas imaging and a 2021 study looking at the cost-effectiveness of risk-based screening in patients with new-onset diabetes.
Since PanCAN launched the EDI study in 2021, it has uncovered important new information about the connection between new-onset diabetes and pancreatic cancer. Our hope is that this work lays the foundation to ultimately create a screening process to proactively find patients’ pancreatic cancer – possibly years before it would have otherwise been discovered.
