Initial experience with neoadjuvant FOLFIRINOX as first line therapy for locally advanced pancreatic cancer

The prevalence of pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) is increasing in the western world, being currently on of the leading causes of mortality. Surgical resection provides best chances of cure but, unfortunately, less than 20% of the patients are eligible for curative intent surgery at the time of diagnosis. Chemotherapeutic agents such as FOLFIRINOX have been used in patients with metastatic or locally advanced disease showing survival benefit.

In this pilot study, we present an early initial experience with neoadjuvant FOLFIRINOX as first line therapy for locally advanced and non resectable PDAC highlighting the toxicity and complete resection rates as well as overall survival.

Roughly every patient experienced toxicity according to ECOG criteria with a median recorded event up to 6, most of them grade I and grade II. One third of the patients had downsizing of tumor, however only 43.3% of them ended up having resectable disease. A R0 resection was achieved in 10 of the patients (76.9%). Median follow up for the entire study was 14 months. Fourteen patients (46.6%) had stable disease and 7 (23.3%) had tumor-related death. Approximately 30% of the patients were in remission by the end of follow up. Considering the above results patients that had good response to FOLFIRINOX and underwent R0 surgical treatment had increased their median survival to 30 months compared to those who did not have oncological tumor resection (13 months).

FOLFIRINOX is an effective treatment regimen that manages to convert unresectable -at diagnosis PDAC- to resectable with increased survival. However, due to high toxicity, treatment is only feasible in selected patients and requires close monitoring.