© 2024 HSP News Service, L.L.C.
Margaret A. Tempero, MD, discusses phase III results from the multicenter APACT trial, which showed that adjuvant nab-paclitaxel plus gemcitabine may be an option for patients who are ineligible for treatment with FOLFIRINOX (Abstract 4000).
The randomized phase III POLO trial found that maintenance therapy with the poly (ADP-ribose) polymerase inhibitor olaparib significantly delayed the progression of metastatic pancreatic cancer in patients with germline BRCA gene mutations compared with placebo (median...
Alok A. Khorana, MD, of the Cleveland Clinic, and Hedy L. Kindler, MD, of The University of Chicago, discuss phase III findings on olaparib as maintenance treatment following first-line platinum-based chemotherapy in patients with metastatic pancreatic cancer and a germline BRCA mutation (Abstract LBA4).
Although the detection of pancreatic cancer at early stages would offer an improved chance for successful treatment and survival, symptoms of pancreatic cancer are usually vague or absent, and screening to detect pancreatic cancer earlier is not recommended for average-risk asymptomatic patients....
After disclosing that he had been diagnosed with stage IV pancreatic cancer, Alex Trebek, longtime host of the popular television game show Jeopardy!, vowed that he would beat the disease despite the low associated survival rate. His statement has brought pancreatic cancer back into the public...
The poly (ADP-ribose) polymerase (PARP) inhibitor rucaparib holds promise as maintenance therapy for advanced, platinum-sensitive, BRCA- or PALB2-mutated pancreatic cancer, according to an interim analysis of an ongoing phase II clinical trial presented at the 2019 Annual Meeting of the American...
The recently released ASCO Clinical Practice Provisional Clinical Opinion on Evaluating Susceptibility to Pancreatic Cancer highlights the importance of emerging data indicating a relatively high rate of germline mutations in pancreatic cancer.1 Recent studies have demonstrated that up to 1 in 10...
In 1996, the National Comprehensive Cancer Network® (NCCN®) published its first set of Clinical Practice Guidelines in Oncology (NCCN Guidelines®), covering eight tumor types. NCCN Guidelines are now published for more than 70 tumor types and topics. Some of the key updates for 2019 were presented...
ALTHOUGH IMMUNOTHERAPIES have had limited success in pancreatic cancer to date, findings from a molecular analysis of the tumor microenvironment suggest that certain subtypes may be more responsive to treatment. According to data presented at the 2019 Society of Surgical Oncology Annual Cancer...
THE 2019 American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) Annual Meeting was held March 29 to April 3 in Atlanta. In addition to our regular coverage of news stories from the meeting, here are some brief highlights of additional noteworthy studies. Stage IV HER2-Positive Breast Cancer: Surgery or No ...
In a study reported in JAMA Surgery, Dimitrakopoulos et al found two single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in noncoding, functional regions of genes that regulate cancer progression. They were associated with survival after resection of pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma. The study involved...
A newly published Mayo Clinic study has found that a presurgery treatment plan for patients with borderline/locally advanced pancreatic cancer undergoing total neoadjuvant therapy may improve outcomes. The findings were published by Truty et al in Annals of Surgery. The study followed 194...
Researchers have identified a new potential immunotherapy target in pancreatic cancer, which so far has been notoriously resistant to treatment with immune checkpoint blockade drugs effective against a variety of other cancers. A research team from The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center...
SEVERAL STUDIES at the 2019 Gastrointestinal Cancers Symposium evaluated the benefits of neoadjuvant treatment in patients with pancreatic cancer—and in patients deemed fully resectable, not just “borderline” resectable.1-3 Although the standard of care for resectable pancreatic ductal...
Maintenance treatment with the PARP inhibitor rucaparib was well tolerated and showed activity among patients with advanced BRCA- or PALB2-mutated pancreatic cancer sensitive to platinum-based chemotherapy, according to results from an interim analysis of an ongoing phase II clinical...
A higher body mass index (BMI) before age 50 may be more strongly associated with pancreatic cancer mortality risk than excess weight at older age, according to the results of a study presented by Jacobs et al at the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) Annual Meeting 2019 (Abstract...
In a study reported in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, Abe et al found previously unidentified deleterious germline mutations in patients with family history as the basis for pancreatic surveillance. Moreover, the study showed the risk of pancreatic cancer was higher in individuals with germline...
An interim analysis of a small phase Ib study by O’Hara et al evaluating the CD40 agonistic monoclonal antibody APX005M in combination with gemcitabine and nab-paclitaxel with or without the programmed cell death protein 1 (PD-1) inhibitor nivolumab in untreated patients with metastatic...
Margaret A. Tempero, MD, of the UCSF Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center, discusses new adjuvant therapy options for patients with pancreatic cancer, and germline testing, including testing for microsatellite instability/mismatch repair genes as well as molecular analysis of all tumors.
In the phase I/II SWOG S1313 trial, which was reported in the Journal of Clinical Oncology by Ramanathan et al, researchers found that the addition of pegylated recombinant human hyaluronidase (PEGPH20) to modified (m) FOLFIRINOX (fluorouracil, leucovorin, irinotecan, and oxaliplatin) worsened...
The Pancreatic Cancer Collective—the strategic partner of the Lustgarten Foundation and Stand Up To Cancer (SU2C)—has awarded a total of $7 million in first-round New Therapies Challenge grants to 7 teams of top cancer researchers to explore new pancreatic cancer treatments. Each team will receive...
Patients with advanced pancreatic cancer who have homologous repair damage response mutations may derive considerable benefit from treatment with platinum agents, according to an analysis of patients in the Know Your Tumor Program presented by Michael Pishvaian, MD, PhD, of Georgetown University,...
ANDREW X. ZHU, MD, PhD, of Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center and Harvard Medical School, noted that Prep-02/ JSAP-05 is the first study to show the value of neoadjuvant chemotherapy in patients with resectable pancreatic adenocarcinoma. However, the findings are applicable only to Asian ...
SEVERAL STUDIES presented at the 2019 Gastrointestinal Cancers Symposium evaluated the benefits of neoadjuvant treatment in patients with pancreatic cancer—and in patients deemed fully resectable, not just “borderline” resectable.1-3 Although the standard of care for resectable pancreatic ductal...
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recently granted the following designations and applications and also issued a statement: Priority Review for Pexidartinib in Tenosynovial Giant Cell Tumor The FDA has accepted a new drug application (NDA) and granted Priority Review for pexidartinib...
Pancreaticoduodenectomy, or the Whipple procedure, is one of the most complex abdominal surgeries, and is commonly prescribed as a first line of therapy for cancer located within the pancreatic head. Investigators reported that following a 5-day accelerated recovery pathway after surgery helped to...
Andrew X. Zhu, MD, PhD, of the Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center, discusses phase II/III study findings on neoadjuvant chemotherapy with gemcitabine and S-1 vs upfront surgery for resectable pancreatic cancer (Abstract 189).
Heinz-Josef Lenz, MD, discusses molecular profiling and response to chemotherapy in the COMPASS study, which was designed to evaluate the feasibility of using genomic sequencing in pancreatic cancer care (Abstract 188).
A phase II/III trial presented by Unno et al at the 2019 Gastrointestinal Cancers Symposium (Abstract 189) sought to compare neoadjuvant chemotherapy (using gemcitabine and the oral fluoropyrimidine combination of tegafur/gimeracil/oteracil [S-1]) to upfront surgery in patients with histologic ...
Researchers have identified a new potential immunotherapy target in pancreatic cancer, which so far has been notoriously resistant to treatment with immune checkpoint blockade drugs effective against a variety of other cancers. A research team from The University of Texas MD Anderson ...
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recently issued the following new designations and clearances: Fast Track Designation for Itolizumab for the Treatment of Acute Graft-vs-Host Disease The FDA granted Fast Track designation to itolizumab for the treatment of acute graft-vs-host ...
In a phase III Canadian and French trial reported in The New England Journal of Medicine, Conroy and colleagues in the Canadian Cancer Trials Group and the Unicancer-GI–PRODIGE Group found that adjuvant modified FOLFIRINOX (fluorouracil, leucovorin, irinotecan, oxaliplatin) produced better...
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recently issued the following new approvals and designations: Approval for Pegfilgrastim Biosimilar The FDA recently approved a pegfilgrastim biosimilar, pegfilgrastim-cbqv (Udenyca). The biosimilar has been approved to decrease the incidence...
In a study reported in JAMA Surgery, van Roessel et al found that the recently released 8th edition of the American Joint Committee on Cancer (AJCC) tumor-node-metastasis (TNM) staging system for pancreatic cancer provided better distribution among cases and some increase in prognostic...
In a retrospective cohort study reported in JAMA Surgery, Carlos Fernández-del Castillo, MD, of the Department of Surgery, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, and colleagues found that neoadjuvant therapy in patients with pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma was associated with...
In a study reported in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, Fahrmann et al developed and validated a plasma-derived metabolite panel that distinguished early-stage pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) with high accuracy. Accuracy was further improved with the addition of a previously...
In a research letter published in JAMA Surgery, Tang et al found that higher levels of intratumoral CD3-positive T cells and postoperative circulating monocyte counts were associated with improved survival in patients with upfront resectable pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma. The prospective cohort ...
PapGene, Inc, has announced their cancer detection test has received Breakthrough Device designation from the Center for Devices and Radiological Health (CDRH) of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The PapGene test is a multianalyte test that uses a combination of circulating tumor DNA...
According to the American Cancer Society, cancer is the leading cause of death for Hispanics and Asian/Pacific Islanders in the United States. However, their cancer burden is less than that of non-Hispanic whites and especially non-Hispanic blacks, who bear the most disproportionate share of the...
For patients with newly diagnosed, potentially resectable pancreatic cancer, neoadjuvant chemoradiotherapy led to better outcomes when compared with immediate surgery followed by chemoradiotherapy in the phase III PREOPANC-1 trial. Approximately 25% fewer deaths occurred among patients in the...
Pancreatic cancer often metastasizes to the liver or lungs. The prognosis is better for patients with metastases in the lungs. However, the organ that is more likely to be affected depends on the cancer cells’ ability to alter their characteristics and shape—as a research team at the...
A large study of pancreatic cancer patients found that almost 10% harbored inherited genetic variations or mutations that may have increased their susceptibility to the disease. At the same time, some of these mutations were associated with more favorable responses to certain chemotherapy agents,...
THE INFORMATION contained in this Clinical Trials Resource Guide includes actively recruiting clinical studies focused on pancreatic cancer. These studies are investigating radiotherapy; cancer vaccines; combination treatments; novel cell therapies; response prediction; and more. All of the studies ...
Adjuvant treatment with modified FOLFIRINOX resulted in the longest overall survival yet reported for patients with resected pancreatic cancer, according to the results of the phase III Unicancer GI PRODIGE 24/CCTG PA.6 trial, presented at the 2018 ASCO Annual Meeting.1 With adjuvant modified...
In a single-institution phase II trial reported in JAMA Oncology, Murphy et al found that total neoadjuvant therapy with FOLFIRINOX (fluorouracil [5-FU], irinotecan, and oxaliplatin) and individualized chemoradiotherapy was associated with a high R0 resection rate and good outcomes in patients with ...
According to the American Cancer Society, pancreatic cancer is one of the most deadly cancers, with an overall 5-year survival rate of just 8%, mainly because the vast majority of patients, about 80%, are diagnosed at a late stage of disease. Research has shown that identification of high-risk ...
USE OF THE FOLFIRINOX regimen (fluorouracil, leucovorin, irinotecan, and oxaliplatin) was associated with a 4.9-month improvement in overall survival compared to gemcitabine/ nab-paclitaxel (Abraxane) in the neoadjuvant treatment of resectable and borderline-resectable pancreatic head...
The Henry Ford Health System announced the receipt of a $20 million gift (from an individual donor who wishes to remain anonymous) to launch the Henry Ford Pancreatic Cancer Center, which will focus on global collaborations to develop new methods for the early detection of pancreatic cancer. David ...
Thierry Conroy, MD, of the Institut de Cancérologie de Lorraine, discusses phase III study findings on adjuvant mFOLFIRINOX vs gemcitabine in patients with resected pancreatic ductal adenocarcinomas (Abstract LBA4001).
Geertjan Van Tienhoven, MD, PhD, of the Dutch Pancreatic Cancer Group, discusses phase III study findings on preoperative chemoradiotherapy vs immediate surgery for resectable and borderline resectable pancreatic cancer (Abstract LBA4002).