The goal of this Phase 1 clinical research study is to find the highest safe dose of BIND-014 that can be given in the treatment of patients with advanced or metastatic cancer.
Patients are routinely asked to sign an "informed consent" document prior to starting chemotherapy, indicating they understand the risks and benefits of treatment. Although this could be a strategic moment to equip patients with information they need to make truly informed medical decisions, many patients and caregivers note that these conversations are less useful than they could be. The informed consent process and its associated documents suffer several limitations: 1) risks are emphasized over benefits; 2) educational materials focus on individual drugs instead of regimens; 3) information is presented in written instead of alternative written/audiovisual format; and 4) the patient perspective is lacking.
The overarching objective of this project is to develop a library of communication tools for the most common chemotherapy regimens used to treat advanced gastrointestinal cancers. Tools will include video clips and written documents that can be readily distributed, modified, and customized. This toolkit will be crafted in collaboration with oncologists and patients living with gastrointestinal cancer and improves upon existing resources in several ways: 1) balanced discussion of benefits as well as risks, 2) focus on regimens rather than drugs, 3) use of both written and video format, and 4) inclusion of the patient perspective (e.g. video clips of patients describing their experience). A panel of oncologist and patient stakeholders will evaluate the acceptability of the tools. The investigators will then conduct a randomized clinical trial to demonstrate if the informed consent toolkit improves the quality of informed consent for palliative chemotherapy. If effective, the tools will be amenable to broad dissemination via patient accessible cancer education websites and oncology clinics.
RATIONALE: Drugs used in chemotherapy, such as cisplatin, capecitabine, gemcitabine hydrochloride, epirubicin hydrochloride, and docetaxel, work in different ways to stop the growth of tumor cells, either by killing the cells or by stopping them from dividing. Giving more than one drug (combination chemotherapy) may kill more tumor cells. It is not yet known whether cisplatin, capecitabine, and gemcitabine hydrochloride are more effective when given together with epirubicin hydrochloride or docetaxel in treating patients with advanced or metastatic pancreatic cancer.
PURPOSE: This randomized phase II trial is studying the side effects of giving cisplatin, capecitabine, and gemcitabine hydrochloride together with epirubicin hydrochloride compared with giving cisplatin, capecitabine, and gemcitabine hydrochloride together with docetaxel and to see how well it works in treating patients with stage III or stage IV pancreatic cancer.
Over 7000 patients are diagnosed with pancreas cancer every year in the UK. Only 10% have it caught early enough to have surgery to cure it. The rest at best can undergo chemotherapy to extend survival, but current treatments offer at best an improvement of only a few months compared to no treatment at all. In addition only about a quarter of patients will respond to the treatment. In addition these patients often experience profound weight loss, loss of appetite and energy primarily because of the cancer process itself. Our hypothesis is that the addition of fish oil infusion to gemcitabine chemotherapy will result in an improved rate of tumour response on CT imaging.
Fish oils, or specifically the omega-3 fatty acid component, appear to have a range of powerful anti-cancer actions. This is supported by evidence from a wide range of sources, from laboratory experiments to basic human studies. Although this evidence specifically includes many pancreatic cancer studies in the laboratory it has not yet been confirmed in human trials.
Contrary to conventional chemotherapy, fish oil is a naturally occuring non-toxic compound and so is not associated with the side-effects of chemotherapy. In fact a number of clinical studies have demonstrated significant improvements in quality of life for pancreas cancer patients treated with fish oil, particularly with reference to improvements in appetite and energy levels. This is of course in addition to the anti-cancer actions.
Incidental pancreatic solid or cystic lesions are diagnosed with increased frequency due to the widespread use of abdominal cross-sectional imaging to investigate unrelated symptoms. Lesions such as neuroendocrine tumors (NET), mucinous cystadenomas and intraductal papillary mucinous neoplasms (IPMNs) have the potential of malignant transformation. The standard treatment of solid or cystic pancreatic lesions with malignant potential has been surgical resection, with lesions in the pancreatic head requiring a Whipple resection whereas pancreatic tail lesions are treated with distal pancreatectomy. Both types of resection carry significant morbidity and mortality. The study would like to outline the feasibility, safety, adverse events and early results of endoscopic ultrasound (EUS) – radiofrequency ablation (RFA) in pancreatic neoplasms.
Circulating tumor DNA assays are becoming relevant for routine diagnostics, but many related aspects are yet unresolved. With this project, the investigators aim to develop pragmatic molecular diagnostic pathways of liquid biopsies relevant in advanced gastrointestinal malignancies with focus on clinical utility and sensible use of resources. They want to evaluate the ctDNA assays on a fully automated "low-cost" multiplex platform which is already implemented in routine molecular diagnostics of solid biopsies. The project will evaluate to what extent these ctDNA assays are relevant for clinical decision-making.
AVM Biotechnology, Inc., provides immunomodulatory AVM0703 to solid tumor and blood cancer patients upon request by a US licensed MD or DO. As of July 2024, 37 patients have been treated through this FDA-EAP including patients diagnosed with relapsed or recurring glioblastoma, inoperable/chemotherapy ineligible CNS Squamous Cell Carcinoma, metastatic Breast Cancer, ovarian cancer, gastric cancer, Hodgkin's Lymphoma, Mixed Phenotype Acute Myelogenous Leukemia, colon cancer, B-ALL, Malignant Myxoid Spindle Cell Neoplasm, non-small cell lung cancer, DLBCL with CNS involvement, metastatic prostate cancer, Anaplastic T-cell Non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma and metastatic pancreatic cancer. Drug-related side-effects are predominantly grade 1 and include itching during the infusion and about 1 week of low grade insomnia.
The purpose of this research study is to study a method to detect pancreatic precancer and cancer (ductal adenocarcinoma) using ultrasound technology in those who are at significantly increased risk for developing pancreatic cancer. The LINFU™ Technique is done by analysis of pancreatic fluid collected with the help of ultrasound. This is an investigational way to detect pancreatic precancers and ductal adenocarcinoma.
This single-arm, Phase II clinical trial is to evaluate the efficacy and safety of nab-paclitaxel plus S-1 in locally advanced pancreatic cancer who were borderline resectable or unresectable .
Pancreatic cancer (PC) is one of the deadliest diseases of human digestive malignancies. Despite the recent advances in surgery and chemotherapy, the 5-year survival rate of PC continues to be less than 10%. As a promising tumor therapy,Chimeric antigen receptor T cell (CAR-T), however, performed poorly in PC treatment and need to be further updated. In our study, on the basis of our previous research, we use anti-MSLN CAR-T as effector cell and explore the different effects and mechanism of gut microbiota (PC or healthy control) on anti-MSLN CAR-T treatment. Firstly, we detect the differences of gut microbiota and T cell cholesterol metabolism in PC and healthy control by means of 16S-rRNA,PCR, western blot and ELISA; explore the different effects of gut microbiota on the subtype of T cells; and analyze the relationships between intestinal flora composition and T cell cholesterol metabolism or subtype changes by means of Spearman's correlation. Secondly, we also explore the different effects of gut microbiota on the proliferation, migration, subtype, inflammatory cytokines expression and anti-tumor effector function of anti-MSLN CAR-T cells by means of flow cytometry and cytotoxicity assay. Thirdly, we discuss the different expression of cholesterol esterification enzyme 1 (ACAT-1) and other core genes of cholesterol metabolism in anti-MSLN CAR-T. Lastly, we evaluate the effects of different gut microbiota on the treatment of PC by anti-MSLN CAR-T cells in NSG mouse model of subcutaneous PC transplantation and liver metastasis. Through the above experiments, a new theoretical basis is provided in which gut microbiota regulates the subtype and anti-tumor function of anti-MSLN CAR-T by ACAT-1 expression. Furthermore, our findings, which demonstrate the relationship of gut microbiota and CAR-T cell, may be translatable for the treatment of other solid tumors like PC.
