Contemporary adjuvant therapy for pancreatic cancer patients following surgical resection includes chemotherapy and chemoradiotherapy. However, the median survival remains approximately 20 months despite multi-modality treatment using gemcitabine or fluoropyrimidine systemic chemotherapy. Adjuvant randomized trials are currently underway to evaluate cytotoxic combinations found to be active in advanced disease including FOLFIRINOX, gemcitabine/nab-paclitaxel and gemcitabine/capecitabine. Immunotherapy using genetically engineered cell-based vaccines had shown promise in resected pancreatic cancer patients during early phase trials, and algenpantucel-L vaccine is currently being evaluated in adjuvant setting in a randomized trial. This review focuses on novel adjuvant therapies currently in clinical evaluation.
Keywords: Pancreatic cancer; adjuvant therapy; immunotherapy; vaccines.