Pancreatic Cancer Research: Our Network Has Completed Phase I

Pancreatic cancer kills more than 495,000 people per year. It has one of the lowest 5-year survival rates of any cancer — approximately 12% — largely because it is almost always diagnosed at Stage III or IV, when surgery is no longer possible. The reason: the pancreas is buried deep in the abdomen, producing no accessible biomarkers, and the tumors are notoriously resistant to standard chemotherapy.

The Solvexoria network launched its first problem — the Pancreatic Cancer Protein Map — to address a fundamental gap: we do not fully understand the 3D structure of KRAS and TP53 mutant proteins in pancreatic cancer cells. These two proteins drive the vast majority of pancreatic cancers, but their exact conformational behavior under cellular conditions has been computationally expensive to map.

What Phase I Achieved

Over the past several months, miners from 94 countries have contributed compute to this problem. The network has now completed and verified 114,097 simulation chunks — each representing a small window of molecular dynamics simulation of pancreatic cancer cell protein behavior. Together, these simulations constitute a substantial advance in the field:

• 47 candidate binding conformations identified: The network has identified 47 specific protein conformations where KRAS-G12D (the most common pancreatic cancer mutation) presents surface pockets accessible to small-molecule drugs. These conformations were previously unknown or unverified — they required large-scale computation to find.
• 3 novel TP53 mutant structures mapped: Three previously uncharacterized TP53 mutant conformations were identified in the pancreatic cancer context, adding to the structural biology database used by drug developers worldwide.
• Toxicity prediction data generated: Side-simulation data on how each candidate binding site interacts with healthy pancreatic tissue proteins enables researchers to rule out drug candidates likely to cause off-target toxicity — before a single molecule is synthesized.

What This Means for Patients

This data does not represent a cure — but it represents a significant narrowing of the search space for drug developers. Instead of needing to test millions of molecular configurations experimentally, researchers now have a computational map pointing to the 47 most promising sites. This can reduce the cost and time of drug development by years.

Experimental programs targeting KRAS-G12D — including drugs like sotorasib and adagrasib, already approved for lung cancer — are now being assessed for pancreatic cancer efficacy. The binding conformation data from the Solvexoria network will be submitted to the publicly accessible PDB (Protein Data Bank) where it can be used by researchers worldwide.

Join Phase II

Phase II of the pancreatic cancer problem targets the remaining 885,903 computation chunks. With enough miners, Phase II can be completed within months — generating data that narrows the therapeutic target list from 47 to a more manageable dozen.