Pancreatic Cancer Clinical Trials

August 2013 - December 2015
To compare the overall survival in patients with previously untreated metastatic pancreatic cancer receiving: gemcitabine/nab-paclitaxel plus OGX-427 or gemcitabine/nab-paclitaxel plus placebo Sponsor: Sarah Cannon Research Institute

June 2013 -
The goal of this clinical research study is to find the highest tolerable dose of BikDD nanoparticle that can be given to patients with advanced cancer of the pancreas. The safety of this drug will also be studied. Sponsor: M.D. Anderson Cancer Center

May 2013 -
This is a Phase II clinical trial, which tests the safety and effectiveness of an investigational combination of drugs to learn whether the combination of drugs works in treating a specific cancer. "Investigational" means that the combination of drugs is being studied. It also means that the FDA has not yet approved it for your type of cancer. Proton beam radiation therapy is an FDA approved radiation delivery system. Conventional radiation therapy uses photons to treat cancer before patients undergo surgery to remove the tumor. In this study we are using radiation with protons, which spares surrounding tissue and organs from radiation. Proton radiation delivers radiation to the area requiring radiation with no dose beyond the treatment area. This may reduce side effects that patients would normally experience with conventional radiation therapy. Researchers in the laboratory have discovered pathways inside cancer cells which contribute to the growth and survival of tumors. The FOLFIRINOX chemotherapy regimen is a combination of the drugs 5-fluorouracil, leucovorin and oxaliplatin. These chemotherapy drugs, along with the chemotherapy drug capecitabine, work by blocking these pathways and thereby preventing tumor growth. Capecitabine is FDA approved to be used alone or with other drugs to treat other types of advanced cancer, but not pancreatic cancer. In past research studies, FOLFIRINOX followed by radiation therapy with capecitabine has been identified as the most effective and active chemotherapy for patients with cancer that is spreading, and this is why we are using it to treat your type of cancer. Losartan is classified as an angiotensin-receptor blocker (ARB), and is FDA approved for use in people with high blood pressure. Recent studies in people with different types of cancer, including pancreatic cancer, have shown that combining chemotherapy drugs with an ARB can help reduce/stop tumor growth more effectively than chemotherapy alone. Losartan has been used in previous research studies, and information from those research studies suggests that this drug in combination with FOLFIRINOX and capecitabine may be better at treating your type of cancer. In this research study, we seek to determine whether combining FOLFIRINOX with Losartan before proton radiation therapy will be more efficient at controlling the growth of or shrinking your tumor than just FOLFIRINOX alone. Sponsor: Massachusetts General Hospital

April 2013 - June 2017
Unfortunately, despite the best clinical efforts and breakthroughs in biotechnology, most patients diagnosed with pancreatic cancer continue to die from the rapid progression of their disease. One primary reason for this is that the disease is typically without symptoms until significant local and/or distant spread has occurred and is often beyond the chance for cure at the time of the diagnosis. The lack of any treatment to substantially increase long term survival rates is reflected by the poor outcomes associated with this disease, specifically time to disease progression and overall survival. However, another important part of the body is now being looked at as a target for therapy against this disease - the immune system. Scientists have clearly shown that pancreatic tumor cells produce a number of defective proteins, or express normal proteins in highly uncharacteristic ways, as part of this cancer. In some cancers, these abnormalities can cause an immune response to the cancer cells much in the way one responds to infected tissue. In progressive cancers however, the immune system fails to effectively identify or respond to these abnormalities and the cancer cells are not attacked or destroyed for reasons not yet fully understood. This clinical trial proposes a new way to stimulate the immune system to recognize pancreatic cancer cells and to stimulate an immune response that destroys or blocks the growth of the cancer. This new method of treatment helps the immune system of pancreatic cancer patients to "identify" the cancerous tissue so that it can be eliminated from the body. As an example, most people are aware that patients with certain diseases may require an organ transplant to replace a damaged kidney or heart. After receiving their transplant, these patients receive special drugs because they are at great danger of having an immune response that destroys or "rejects" the transplanted organ. This "rejection" occurs when their immune system responds to differences between the cells of the transplanted organ and their own immune system by attacking the foreign tissue in the same way as it would attack infected tissue. When the differences between foreign tissues and the patient's body are even larger, as with the differences between organs from different species, the rejection is very rapid, highly destructive, and the immunity it generates is longlasting. This is called hyperacute rejection and the medicine used to immunize patients in this protocol tries to harness this response to teach a patient's immune system to fight their pancreatic cancer just as the body would learn to reject a transplanted organ from an animal. To do this, HyperAcute-Pancreas immunotherapy contains human pancreatic cancer cells that contain a mouse gene that marks the cancer cells as foreign to patient's immune systems. The immune system therefore attacks these cancer cells just as they would attack any truly foreign tissue, destroying as much as it can. Additionally, the immune system is stimulated to identify differences (aside from the mouse gene) between these cancer cells and normal human tissue as foreign. This "education" of the immune system helps treat the patient because pancreatic cancer cells already present in a treated patient are believed to show some of the same differences from normal tissue as the modified pancreatic cancer cells in the product. Due to these similarities, the immune system, once "educated" by the HyperAcute-Pancreas immunotherapy, identifies the patient's cancer as foreign and attacks. The chemotherapy combination to be used in this study has been shown to improve survival in advanced pancreatic cancer and is being combined with an experimental pancreatic cancer immunotherapy that stimulates the immune system to recognize and attack the cancer. One goal of this study is to determine whether chemotherapy and immunotherapies can work cooperatively to increase anti-tumor effects to levels beyond what would be seen with either treatment alone. In this experimental study, all patients are given a strong combination of anti-tumor chemotherapies while some patients are also given injections of an immunotherapy drug consisting of two types of pancreatic cancer cells that we have modified to make them more easily recognized and attacked by the immune system. We propose to test this new treatment protocol in patients with locally advanced pancreatic cancer to demonstrate that treatment with the immunotherapy increases the time until the tumor progresses or increases overall survival when given in combination with the current standard of care therapy for this disease. Sponsor: NewLink Genetics Corporation

March 2013 - June 2013
This study is being conducted to identify altered genetic factors that may exist and influence endocrine cancers in unrelated MEN1 families with different cancers. A grading system will be developed for endocrine cancers, including thyroid cancer, pancreatic cancers, thymus gland cancers, parathyroid disease and MEN1 syndrome as low-risk and high-risk to improve screening and timing of surgery. Sponsor: Jersey Shore University Medical Center

March 2013 - April 2022
This randomized trial examines the effectiveness of chemoradiotherapy compared to chemotherapy alone after induction chemotherapy with 3 cycles of gemcitabine or 6 cycles of FOLFIRINOX in patients with locally advanced, non resectable and non-metastatic pancreatic cancer. Chemotherapeutic agent in chemoradiotherapy is gemcitabine administered in 5 cycles, the agent and its administration for sole chemotherapy is determined by induction chemotherapy. Operability of tumor is evaluated four weeks after end of treatment. Patients will be followed for the duration of therapy and for 5 years after the last study treatment. Overall survival at the end of follow up is defined as primary endpoint. Secondary endpoints are tumor-free survival, rate of local recurrence or local progression, rate of distant metastasis, acute and late toxicity of the chemoradiotherapy, quality of life, rate of remission, rate of curative resections (R0) after chemotherapy and chemoradiotherapy. It is planned to include a total number of 830 patients. Sponsor: University of Erlangen-Nürnberg Medical School

March 2013 - May 2017
Purpose of this phase I/II study is to test how well LY2090314 works in combination with different chemotherapies in treating participants with metastatic pancreatic cancer. Sponsor: Eli Lilly and Company

February 2013 -
The purpose of this study is to investigate the effect of preoperative immunonutrition on complications and length of hospital stay in patients with pancreatic cancer undergoing elective surgery. Sponsor: University of Copenhagen

February 2013 - January 2014
This study will test the amount of tissue, called "cell block", obtained from your pancreas. Patients who are asked to participate in this study have a growth (mass) in the pancreas that needs a biopsy so a diagnosis can be made. Although we usually perform 2 to 4 passes (number of times the doctor biopsies the mass), at this time we do not know the ideal number of passes needed to obtain adequate amount of tissue for making a diagnosis. The purpose of this study is to compare the amount of tissue obtained with 2 passes versus 4 passes. Sponsor: Florida Hospital

February 2013 - December 2016
The purpose of this study is to find out if a program of intensive chemotherapy with gemcitabine, docetaxel and capecitabine followed by an advanced form of focused radiation aimed at participant's tumor followed by more chemotherapy can increase the chances that the participant's pancreatic tumor can be removed completely. Sponsor: H. Lee Moffitt Cancer Center and Research Institute