Archives: Clinical Trials

RATIONALE: Drugs used in chemotherapy use different ways to stop tumor cells from dividing so they stop growing or die. It is not yet known if gemcitabine is more effective when given alone or in combination with another chemotherapy drug in treating cancer of the pancreas.

PURPOSE: Randomized phase II trial to compare the effectiveness of gemcitabine given alone or in combination with other chemotherapy drugs in treating patients who have metastatic cancer of the pancreas.

RATIONALE: Monoclonal antibodies, such as maytansinoid DM4-conjugated humanized monoclonal antibody huC242, can block tumor growth in different ways. Some block the ability of tumor cells to grow and spread. Others find tumor cells and help kill them or carry tumor-killing substances to them.

PURPOSE: This phase I trial is studying the side effects and best dose of maytansinoid DM4-conjugated humanized monoclonal antibody huC242 in treating patients with solid tumors that cannot be removed by surgery or have spread to other parts of the body.

The purpose of this study is to see whether it is possible to give 8 doses of a combination of chemotherapy called FOLFIRINOX before surgery in subjects whose pancreas cancer can be removed with surgery.

Malnutrition and loss of muscle mass frequently occur in patients undergoing chemotherapy and can negatively effect therapy outcome. Especially patients with cancer of the gastrointestinal tract are often affected by malnutrition. Therefore, this study aims to examine changes in nutritional status of patients with cancer of the gastrointestinal tract during chemotherapy. Findings of this study will help to improve nutritional treatment of patients undergoing chemotherapy.

This phase 1 trial will investigate the toxicity of combining interleukin 12 gene therapy with standard chemotherapy in metastatic pancreatic cancer.

The main research objective is to work out the optimal doses of the novel combination of gemcitabine, oxaliplatin and imatinib mesylate (glivec) in patients with advanced pancreatic cancer that has progressed during or after treatment with first-line gemcitabine.

This trial studies how well computed tomography works in diagnosing patients with pancreatic or hepatobiliary cancer. Computed tomography may help researchers predict how patients with pancreatic or hepatobiliary cancer may respond to chemotherapy.

Pancreatic pseudocysts (PP) present as a complication that occurs in 5-15% of acute pancreatitis and 26-40% of chronic pancreatitis (1-3). To date the endoscopic drainage with endoscopic ultrasound (EUS) has replace the surgical treatment due to the similar success and complication rate but with a lower cost and short hospital stay (4-6). Regarding recurrence, it is important to know the anatomy of the main pancreatic duct (MPD). For this purpose, the endoscopic retrograde pancreatography (ERP) has been describe as a useful tool. In fact, many authors perform it before the endoscopic drainage while others wait several weeks after the drainage (7-9) with similar technical success (5,8). However, there are no studies that compare the technical difficulty and the total cost between these two approaches.

This phase II trial studies how well dovitinib lactate works in treating patients with pancreatic neuroendocrine tumors. Dovitinib lactate may stop the growth of tumor cells by blocking some of the enzymes needed for cell growth.

This is a single arm phase II trial assessing the potential activity of combination PEGPH20 plus Gemcitabine with radiotherapy in ten patients with localized, unresectable pancreatic adenocarcinoma.