Adjuvant therapy for pancreatic cancer

Pancreatic cancer was once considered to be a disease without hope. Advances in regionalisation of treatment in specialist units have resulted in a great improvement in resection outcome. Studies in advanced pancreatic cancer have indicated an advantage for chemotherapy. For 15 years only the GITSG had tested adjuvant therapy in a randomised controlled trial. This small study of only 43 patients suggested a survival benefit for post-operative chemoradiotherapy combined with follow-on chemotherapy. Recently two large trials of over 800 patients, one from the EORTC and the other from ESPAC, have shown no benefit from chemoradiotherapy alone. Results from a Norwegian and from ESPAC suggest that adjuvant chemotherapy (without chemoradiotherapy) prolongs survival. The major randomisation and recruitment centres for ESPAC include Berne, Switzerland, Verona, Italy and Liverpool, UK. The ESPAC-3 Trial plans to recruit 990 patients to definitively answer the chemotherapy question as adjuvant treatment for pancreatic cancer. The new millennium brings hope at last to the most challenging cancer of all--cancer of the pancreas.