Genetic Therapy for Pancreatic Cancer: Is it the Future?

Abstract

Although surgery is still the only curative therapy for pancre-atic cancer, oncological therapies have started to be more and more promising.We firstly have to consider two important points. The first one is that surgery for pancreatic cancer is complex and risky: perioperative mortality is 4-18% and major complications occur in more than 40% of cases.1 Moreover, only 15-20% of patients have a resectable tumour at the first diagnosis.2 Furthermore, dis-ease’s recurrence following operation is very high because of local invasion and micrometastases at the time of surgery.3 The second point is that the first chemotherapies for pancreatic cancer (5-flu-oro-uracile, and the actually used, gemcitabine) are not specific for pancreatic tumours and have been provided only a little impact on overall survive.