| Summary |
A six-gene signature predicts survival of patients with localized pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma Pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC), comprising over 90% of all pancreatic cancers, remains a lethal disease with an estimated 232,000 new cases, 227,000 deaths per year worldwide, and a less than 5% five-year survival rate. Currently the standard of care for the 20% of patients with localized disease is surgery followed by chemotherapy, and in some cases radiation. Unfortunately despite the use of adjuvant therapy, median survival remains at best 23 months. It is important to note however, that up to 27% of patients with resected PDAC can survive for five years. However, in these studies examining actual long-term survivors, only two have found that adjuvant therapy was associated with improved survival. In addition, randomized controlled trials of gemcitabine-based chemotherapy demonstrate an improvement in median survival of at best 3 months. One possible conclusion from these studies is that tumor biology dictates outcome and that our current adjuvant therapy has only a modest impact on altering a patient's course.Hypothesizing that the dismal outcome of patients with localized disease is due to the presence of micrometastasic disease, current clinical investigation has focused on preoperative or neoadjuvant therapy. This approach, where patients who cannot tolerate the stress of therapy or develop metastatic disease during treatment are spared surgery, has demonstrated an overall survival of 34 months in this highly selected patient population. Therefore the ability to select patients who would most benefit from a neoadjuvant approach may be important. One way to do this is to define a prognostic gene signature that can identify patients with more aggressive tumor biology upfront.
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