Medical treatment of pancreatic cancer

Abstract

Pancreatic carcinoma is a devastating disease with the worst prognosis of all solid tumors; the only cure is surgery. The vast majority of patients are inoperable at the time of diagnosis and require palliative treatment. With a median survival time oscillating around 6 months, indicating an almost complete resistance to conventional cytotoxic and radiation therapy, there is ample room for improvement. Therefore, pancreatic carcinoma has been used to trial many new substances and novel concepts. All aspects of palliative antitumor treatment will be presented in detail and discussed. Finally, some outlooks are given into the future of pancreatic cancer treatment.

Keywords::

• adjuvant
• gene therapy
• immunotherapy
• neoadjuvant
• palliative
• pancreatic carcinoma
• targeted therapy
• therapy

Acknowledgements

The author is a member of the steering committee for pancreatic carcinoma of the National Cancer Society (DKG) and wishes to acknowledge the work of this group. Part of this review uses results worked out during a recent S3 consensus conference on pancreatic carcinoma of the German Society for Gastroenterology (DGVS) that will be published soon. This review also takes into consideration the recent ACS consensus on PDAC [82] as well as the current Cochrane review on PDAC [54].