View clinical trials related to Pancreatic Neoplasms.
Filter by:The purpose of this study is to determine whether Cytokine induced killer cells combined chemotherapy is more effective in the treatment of advanced Pancreatic Cancer.
Does pancreas enzyme replacement (PERT) decrease weight loss and improve quality of life in patients with unresectable pancreatic cancer?
Pancreatic cancer is the fourth leading cause of cancer deaths overall and second after colon and rectum cancer among gastrointestinal cancers in Western countries. In Switzerland, 1,172 new pancreatic cancer patients were diagnosed in 2012. Unfortunately, only about 20% of pancreatic cancer patients present at a disease state that allows surgical resection while 30% have locally advanced, unresectable disease and 50% show distant metastases. While the latter two are currently treated in a palliative setting with median survival of at most 6-12 months, patients who undergo tumor resection with curative intentions also achieve only 5-year survival rates of 20-25% in best hands. The reasons for this poor outcome are thought to be chemoresistance, early establishment of metastatic disease, and importantly, high rates of R1 resections. Up to 80% of pancreatic resections have positive resection margins which are often found within the vascular groove and/or at the retroperitoneal margin, close to the superior mesenteric artery. This high rate of positive margins is only found after meticulous pathological work-up and is normally not detected after standard assessment of the specimen. However, the clinical importance of the high positivity of resection margin is even more highlighted as patients undergoing portal vein resection despite negativity of portal vein invasion after regular pathological work-up show significantly better survival compared to patients without portal vein resection. In sum, given the overall poor prognosis despite tumor resection, auxiliary treatment strategies to improve long-term outcomes are desperately needed. Over the last 5 years, irreversible electroporation (IRE) emerged as a non-thermal ablative modality that allows local tumor destruction with sparing vital structures like arteries, venous vessels, as well as the bile and pancreatic duct. There is increasing evidence that IRE for locally unresectable pancreatic cancer is effective with an increase in local progression free survival , distant progression free survival and overall survival compared to historic controls.Data on margin accentuation IRE are sparse while in a recent study published by Martin et al showed that margin accentuation among patients with borderline resectable disease can be performed safe and efficacious if the treatment can be performed "with a high degree of technical ability and skill set".
In light of this new technology and preliminary findings of low toxicity of online, adaptive, magnetic resonance (M)-guided stereotactic radiation on a single arm prospective study, the investigators propose to compare this technique to online MR-guided stereotactic body radiation therapy (SBRT) without adaptation. Online plan adaptation increases treatment times for patients and comprises an increased burden on technical and clinical staff. Although preliminary trial results are encouraging, it remains unclear if the dosimetric benefits of online-adaptive planning studies will translate to measurable improvements in clinical outcomes that merit its routine use. In our preliminary study, plan adaptation was most often required when tumors were adjacent to the gastrointestinal tract (the esophagus to the sigmoid colon), as those structures were most commonly the dose-limiting structures and were noted to change in location on a day-to-day basis. For these reasons, abdominal disease sites have historically highlighted the limitations of SBRT. Specifically, the investigators will enroll patients with oligometastatic or unresectable primary disease of the non-liver abdomen to a randomized, prospective trial. Patients will be randomized to one of two treatment arms, in which they will receive either online-adaptive, MRI-guided SBRT or non-adaptive MRI-guided SBRT. Both patient groups will undergo MRI simulation and MRI treatment localization with online MR monitoring and/or gating. All patients will be treated in five fractions over one to two weeks. By adhering to strict normal tissue constraints, the investigators expect toxicity to be within the current standard of care for the non-adaptive arm, with reduction in toxicity in the arm of patients who undergo adaptation based on daily anatomic changes.
A. Pancreatic cancer background In 2012, 1,172 new pancreatic cancer patients were diagnosed in Switzerland. Only 20% of the patients with newly diagnosed pancreatic cancer are candidates for surgical resection, the only potential treatment for cure. Over 30% of the patients initially present with locally advanced disease. Patients with locally advanced disease have no evidence of metastatic spread to the liver, lung, and peritoneum but present with local involvement of vital structures that prohibits reasonable tumor resection. Currently, those patients are evaluated for palliative chemotherapy +/- radiation therapy. However, even with best conventional medical therapy, median survival of patients with locally advanced disease is mostly below 1 year. Over the last years, loco-regional therapies gained increased attention including radiofrequency-, cryo-, and microwave ablation as well as electrochemotherapy. However, all those entities are criticized by their complication rates leading to morbidity and mortality, limited area of application given the complex anatomical structures around the pancreas, and ill-defined improvements in overall survival. B. Irreversible electroporation (IRE): Irreversible electroporation is an emerging ablative modality that gained enormous interest over the last five years. For locally advanced pancreatic cancer, it was introduced in 2009. IRE is mainly non-thermal and primarily works through apoptosis. Its well studied safety profile allows ablation also within the context of locally advanced pancreatic cancer given it mainly spares vessels from destruction. Increasing evidence shows that IRE for locally advanced, unresectable pancreatic cancer is effective compared to historic controls with a significant prolongation of local progression free survival, distant progression free survival and overall survival. The improvement in overall survival is about double the amount of what is seen with best new chemotherapy and chemoradiation regimens used at the present time. Those results are even more impressive given the discouraging improvements among palliative systemic options. The NanoKnife IRE device (Angiodynamics, Queensbury, NY) is commonly used to perform IRE procedures in pancreatic cancer patients and is commercially available since 2009 and got Food and Drug Administration (FDA) 510K clearance for soft tissue ablation in October 2011 in the United States. C. Quality of life and nutritional status/long term outcomes Given the overall poor long-term outcomes of patients with pancreatic cancer, health-related quality of life (HRQoL) measures are of utmost importance when treatment recommendations are discussed with patients. This is especially true for patients with more advanced staged disease where definitive surgical resection with curative intent is not possible. However, HRQoL reports for patients with locally advanced pancreatic cancer undergoing IRE are very limited. To the best of the investigators' knowledge, no other specific investigations exist that assessed HRQoL measures for patients undergoing IRE for locally advanced pancreatic cancer, no specific assessment exists that focuses on nutritional status for this patient group. In addition, impact on local and distant recurrence as well as cancer-specific and overall survival are still ill-defined and further information is needed.
The purpose of this study is to determine whether evolution of resting energetic expenditure is a predictive marker of tumoral response for patients suffering from metastatic pancreatic cancer and treated with 1st line of chemotherapy.
The study will perform a clinical study evaluating the safety and tolerability of nintedanib when combined with standard chemotherapy (Gemcitabine + nab-Paclitaxel) for metastatic pancreatic cancer. It will utilize advanced imaging correlates including dynamic contrast enhanced Magnetic Resonance Imaging (DCE-MRI) which correlates with tumor grade and microvessel density.
Registry participants with advanced malignancy or myelodysplasia will have a sample of their tumor or tissue analysed for genetic alterations using next generation sequencing (NGS) performed in a lab that has been certified to meet a high quality standard. Treatments and outcomes will be reported to the registry to allow further understanding of how genetic differences can lead to better diagnosis and treatments.
This is a single center, randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled phase II trial that will compare the efficacy of T-ChOS in combination with gemcitabine to gemcitabine alone as adjuvant treatment for 6 months in patients with surgically resected pancreatic adenocarcinoma.
This phase 1-2 trial studies the side effects and best dose of cetuximab-IRDye 800CW when used with intraoperative imaging, to determine the utility of cetuximab-IRDye 800CW to identify and assess pancreatic cancer in patients undergoing surgery to remove the tumor. Cetuximab-IRDye 800CW may help doctors better identify cancer in the operating room by making the cancer visible when viewed through a fluorescent imaging system.