View clinical trials related to Pancreatic Cancer.
Filter by:The goal of the adaptive trial design is to determine the over-all safety of escalating doses of Rexin-G and to determine the optimal dosing regimen for Rexin-G that would document the significant clinical benefits required to support a Phase II registration protocol.
RATIONALE: Sirolimus may stop the growth of tumor cells by blocking some of the enzymes needed for cell growth. PURPOSE: This phase II trial is studying how well sirolimus works in treating patients with advanced pancreatic cancer.
RATIONALE: Drugs used in chemotherapy, such as gemcitabine, work in different ways to stop the growth of tumor cells, either by killing the cells or by stopping them from dividing. WX-671 may stop the growth of tumor cells by blocking some of the enzymes needed for cell growth. Giving gemcitabine together with WX-671 may kill more tumor cells. PURPOSE: This randomized phase II trial is studying how well gemcitabine works when given together with WX-671 or when given alone in treating patients with locally advanced pancreatic cancer that cannot be removed by surgery.
In patients with unresectable advanced pancreatic cancer, non-inferiority of TS-1 monotherapy and superiority of GEM + TS-1 combination therapy to gemcitabine (GEM) will be verified using survival time.
The study was designed to find the optimum AVN944 dose to use in combination with gemcitabine in patients with pancreatic cancer and see if the combination of the 2 drugs was more effective for treating pancreatic cancer than using gemcitabine alone.
This study with pemetrexed is for patients with metastatic or unresectable pancreatic cancer who progressed after first line chemotherapy with gemcitabine.
RATIONALE: Measuring cadmium levels in urine samples from patients with chronic pancreatitis may help doctors predict which patients may develop pancreatic cancer. It may also help the study of cancer in the future. PURPOSE: This clinical trial is studying urine cadmium levels in predicting pancreatic cancer risk in patients with chronic pancreatitis.
RATIONALE: Diagnostic procedures, such as visceral lymphatic mapping using isosulfan blue, may help find cancer of the pancreas, colon, stomach, small intestine, or gallbladder and find out how far the disease has spread. PURPOSE: This clinical trial is studying the side effects and how well visceral lymphatic mapping using isosulfan blue works in patients with cancer of the pancreas, colon, stomach, small intestine, or gallbladder.
Pancreatic cancer is an aggressive disease with an extremely poor prognosis. It is the forth leading cause of cancer-related fatalities, with an estimated one-year and five-year survival rate of 21% and 5%, respectively. Despite recent progress, the median survival time is 6-10 months for patients with locally advanced disease and 3-6 months for metastatic disease (1). The anti-metabolite gemcitabine has become the standard chemotherapy for locally advanced and metastatic pancreatic cancer, after demonstrating an improved rate of clinical benefit response and an overall survival advantage over 5-FU (2). In addition to its clinical effectiveness gemcitabine has a manageable toxicity profile, making it an attractive agent to investigate in combination with newer agents. Series of phase III trials were conducted examining the efficacy of the combination of gemcitabine and a second cytotoxic agent, including 5-FU, cisplatin, oxaliplatin and irinotecan. These gemcitabine doublets demonstrated no survival advantage over single-agent gemcitabine (3-6). However, the rationale for continuing to study gemcitabine-based combinations remains compelling. Curcumin (diferuloylmethane) is a natural compound derived from the rhizome of Curcuma Longa, an East Indian plant, commonly called turmeric. It has been shown to possess potent anti-inflammatory and anti-oxidative properties, for which it has a long history of dietary use as a food additive. Curcumin has also a potent anti-proliferative effects against a variety of cancer cell lines in vitro, which stem from its ability to modulate many intracellular signal transduction pathways (7). Human phase I-II studies found curcumin to be safe, and indicated no dose-limiting toxicity when taken by mouth at doses up to 10 g/day (8, 9). This data, together with the dismal therapeutic options available for pancreatic cancer patients, suggest that curcumin warrants investigation in this setting. Investigators from MD Anderson Cancer Center and Rambam Medical Center in Haifa, have recently initiated, separately, a phase II study of single agent Curcumin in patients with pancreatic cancer (10). One of the lessons learned from cancer research in recent decades is that combination strategies can provide dramatic improvement in a therapy’s safety and efficacy over mono-therapeutic regiments, especially if the combined drugs differ in their mode of action. In a recent paper that was accepted for publication we demonstrated, in vitro, the mechanism, clinical importance and implications of a novel combinatorial therapy, of celecoxib and curcumin, that was discovered in our lab, in inhibiting the growth of several pancreatic cell lines. P-34 (expressing high levels of COX -2), MiaPaca (Expressing low levels of COX-2) and Panc-1 (no expression of COX -2) cell lines were exposed to different concentrations of celecoxib (0-40µM), curcumin (0-20µM) and their combination. In P-34 cells, curcumin synergistically potentiated the inhibitory effect of celecoxib on cell growth. The growth inhibition was associated with inhibition of proliferation and induction of apoptosis. These experiments further demonstrate, for the first time, that the combination effect is correlated with synergistic augmentation of apoptosis and involves down-regulation of COX-2 protein. The present study evaluates gemcitabine in combination with curcumin and celecoxib for patients with pancreatic cancer.
RATIONALE: Determining how patients makes decisions about participating in a clinical trial may help doctors plan clinical trials in which more patients are willing to participate and are satisfied with their decision to participate. PURPOSE: This clinical trial is studying how patients with stage II, stage III, or stage IV pancreatic cancer or stage III or stage IV colon cancer or rectal cancer make decisions about participating in a clinical trial.