Room for improvement in the treatment of pancreatic cancer: Novel opportunities from gene targeted therapy

Table 1 Targeted therapeutic and pre-clinical strategies tested for gene therapy in pancreatic cancer

Therapeutic strategy	Gene examples
Gene transfer	Anti-angiogenic genes (VEGF, angiostatin, endostatin, thrombostatin etc.)
	Tumor suppressor genes (p53)
	Suicide genes (HSV-TK, Cytochrome P40)
RNA therapy	miRNA (miR-21), ShRNA, siRNA and antisense oligonucleotides (ISIS-2503 and AEG35156)
Gene editing technology	CRISPR-Cas9
Active immunotherapy	Cytokine expression
	Interleukin expression
Adoptive immunotherapy	Peptide, pulsed dendritic cells DNA, bacteria and engineered cells
Vaccination	PLD-1 and CTLA-4 inhibitors
	CAR-T cells (targeting MUC-1)

VEGF: Vascular endothelial growth factor; HSV-TK: Herpes simplex virus thymidine kinase gene; CRISPR-Cas9: Clustered regularly interspaced palindromic repeats-Cas9; PLD-1: Phospholipase D1; CTLA-4: Cytotoxic T-lymphocyte antigen 4; CAR-T: chimeric antigen receptor T- cell; MUC-1: Mucin 1, cell surface associated.