Archives: Clinical Trials

This phase I trial studies the best dose and side effects of mesenchymal stromal cells-derived exosomes with KrasG12D siRNA (iExosomes) in treating participants with pancreatic cancer with KrasG12D mutation that has spread to other places in the body. iExosomes may work better at treating pancreatic cancer.

Intraductal papillary mucinous neoplasms (IPMN) are one of the main precursor lesions of pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC), a lethal disease predicted to become the second leading cause of cancer-related deaths in Western societies within a decade. The mechanisms underlying IPMN progression are poorly understood. The goal of IPMN management is to reduce the risk of patient death due to progression to PDAC through primary and secondary prevention (namely, early diagnosis and risk-reducing surgery). High-risk IPMNs (i.e., high-grade or main duct IPMNs, which account for 57-90% of cases) are referred for surgical resection, while low-risk IPMNs (6-46%) undergo periodic follow-up aimed at monitoring the acquisition of morphological features associated with malignancy over time. However, the clinical management of IPMN remains a significant challenge because the distinction between high and low-risk progression is based on imaging and histological criteria that are not unequivocally recognized and do not take into account the underlying biology of lesions that appear similar but are associated with different clinical behaviors. Consequently, patient risk stratification is often inaccurate, leading to suboptimal treatment. Approximately 1-11% of low-risk IPMN patients assigned to clinical follow-up have developed PDAC. Therefore, it is of paramount importance to improve the understanding of the biology and malignant potential of IPMN to improve prognosis and clinical management of affected patients and guide them toward personalized therapeutic approaches. The availability of markers capable of stratifying IPMN based on their risk of progression to PDAC could enhance the current malignancy criteria assessed in clinical settings by more accurately identifying patients who strongly need surgical resection.

**2 – Study Objective** The aim of this study is to identify and validate biomarkers capable of distinguishing between low-risk and high-risk IPMN progression to PDAC. These biomarkers would help more accurately identify IPMN patients who could benefit from therapeutic intervention and/or surgical resection in the future. The study will include patients with IPMN followed at Fondazione Policlinico Gemelli IRCCS, Fondazione G. Pascale IRCCS, Azienda Ospedaliera Universitaria Integrata Verona, and Azienda Ospedaliera Universitaria Integrata di Messina.

The purpose of the trial is to evaluate the safety of GEN1029 (HexaBody®-DR5/DR5) in a mixed population of patients with specified solid tumors

RATIONALE: Drugs used in chemotherapy, such as capecitabine, streptozocin, and cisplatin, work in different ways to stop the growth of tumor cells, either by killing the cells or by stopping them from dividing. It is not yet known whether giving capecitabine together with streptozocin is more effective with or without cisplatin in treating neuroendocrine tumors.

PURPOSE: This randomized phase II trial is studying giving capecitabine together with streptozocin to see how well it works compared with or without cisplatin in treating patients with unresectable or metastatic neuroendocrine tumors.

The proposed study is an open-label, two-arm study of entinostat plus nivolumab in patients with unresectable or metastatic cholangiocarcinoma (CCA) or pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC).

Biliary stricture is mainly malignant in the adults and caused by several types of fatal malignancies such as pancreatic cancer, cholangiocarcinoma, and metastatic tumor, which have poor prognosis that the overall survival of unresectable lesions is no more than 15 months. The poor outcome often relates to a lack of reliable strategies for early diagnosis, which results in most patients with malignant biliary stricture being already advanced-stage disease at presentation. Therefore, it is critical to discover novel and effective strategies for the early diagnosis of malignant biliary strictures.

Brush cytology and biopsy during endoscopic retrograde cholangiopancreatography (ERCP) are the main methods for recognizing malignant diseases of the bile duct, but their sensitivity is relatively low, 45% and 48.1%, respectively. Even when combined with other biomarkers like carbohydrate antigen 19-9 (CA19-9), their sensitivity is still less than 80%.

In the previous study, the investigators found that bcf-eccDNA has excellent diagnostic value in predicting uncertain bile duct stricture, and the sensitivity and specificity of a related eccDNA in 40 samples are 80.8% and 100%. The sensitivity and specificity of another eccDNA were 92.3% and 92.9%, respectively. However, the sample size is still relatively small, and further prospective studies are needed to evaluate its diagnostic efficacy.

In pancreatic cancer, targeting the tumor microenvironment has become a promising therapeutic strategy. Focal adhesion kinase (FAK) pathway activation is essential for promoting a fibrotic and inflammatory tumor microenvironment, and FAK inhibitors have demonstrated reasonable anti-tumor activity in the preclinical setting. Furthermore, a maximal synergetic effect was achieved when a FAK inhibitor was given in combination with a PD-1 antagonist and chemotherapy in multiple pancreas tumor animal models. This supports the concept of using FAK inhibitors to reduce stromal fibrosis during checkpoint immunotherapeutic treatment. Therefore, these robust preclinical findings will be tested in the proposed phase I trial.

This is a Phase 1, FIH, Dose Escalation and Dose Expansion study to evaluate the safety, tolerability, pharmacokinetics (PK), pharmacodynamics (PD) effects, and preliminary antitumor activity of IK-595, a MEK/RAF molecular glue, administered orally as monotherapy in patients with advanced solid tumors with gene alterations in the RAS- MAPK pathway for whom there are no further treatment options known to confer clinical benefit.

The primary objective of this proposed prospective randomized, multi-center study is to evaluate the capability of the new 22G SharkCore™ needle to obtain tissue specimens and to compare its performance against the standard 22G BNX Endoscopic Ultrasound Fine needle aspiration (Beacon Endoscopic, Newton, MA) needle in the evaluation of solid mass lesions in the pancreas and gastrointestinal tract. The secondary objective is to determine the ability of the 22G SharkCore™ needle system to yield histologic tissue.

Current therapies for Stage IV Pancreatic Cancer provide very limited benefit to the patient. The anti-cancer properties of Antineoplaston therapy suggest that it may prove beneficial in the treatment of Stage IV Pancreatic Cancer.

PURPOSE: This study is being performed to determine the effects (good and bad) that Antineoplaston therapy has on patients with Stage IV Pancreatic Cancer.