Kourie HR, Gharios J, Elkarak F, Antoun J, Ghosn M. Is metastatic pancreatic cancer an untargetable malignancy? World J Gastrointest Oncol 2016; 8(3): 297-304 [PMID: 26989465 DOI: 10.4251/wjgo.v8.i3.297]
Corresponding Author of This Article
Marwan Ghosn, MD, Department of Oncology, Faculty of Medicine, Saint Joseph University, Monot St, PO Box 166830, Beirut, Lebanon. marwanghonmd@yahoo.com
Research Domain of This Article
Oncology
Article-Type of This Article
Minireviews
Open-Access Policy of This Article
This article is an open-access article which was selected by an in-house editor and fully peer-reviewed by external reviewers. It is distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
Hampig Raphael Kourie, Joseph Gharios, Fadi Elkarak, Joelle Antoun, Marwan Ghosn, Department of Oncology, Faculty of Medicine, Saint Joseph University, Beirut, Lebanon
Author contributions: Kourie HR and Ghosn M initiated the review; Kourie HR, Gharios J and Ghosn M performed the review, wrote and analyzed the data; Kourie HR, Gharios J, Elkarak F, Antoun J and Ghosn M reviewed the paper.
Conflict-of-interest statement: Authors confirm that they do not have any conflict of interest.
Open-Access: This article is an open-access article which was selected by an in-house editor and fully peer-reviewed by external reviewers. It is distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
Correspondence to: Marwan Ghosn, MD, Department of Oncology, Faculty of Medicine, Saint Joseph University, Monot St, PO Box 166830, Beirut, Lebanon. marwanghonmd@yahoo.com
Telephone: +961-1-3226842 Fax: +961-1-1613397
Received: June 29, 2015 Peer-review started: July 2, 2015 First decision: September 22, 2015 Revised: November 9, 2015 Accepted: December 18, 2015 Article in press: December 21, 2015 Published online: March 15, 2016 Processing time: 252 Days and 6.2 Hours
Abstract
Metastatic pancreatic cancer (MPC) is one of the most aggressive malignancies, known to be chemo-resistant and have been recently considered resistant to some targeted therapies (TT). Erlotinib combined to gemcitabine is the only targeted therapy that showed an overall survival benefit in MPC. New targets and therapeutic approaches, based on new-TT, are actually being evaluated in MPC going from immunotherapy, epigenetics, tumor suppressor gene and oncogenes to stromal matrix regulators. We aim in this paper to present the major causes rendering MPC an untargetable malignancy and to focus on the new therapeutic modalities based on TT in MPC.
Core tip: This paper will report on the most recent updates in the treatment of metastatic pancreatic cancer (MPC). We present the major causes rendering MPC an untargetable malignancy and we focus on the new therapeutic modalities based on targeted therapies in MPC.
