PP UK

Project Description

Precision-Panc-:  Advancing personalised medicine treatment strategies for pancreatic cancer. 

Precision-Panc aims to establish a mechanism and framework to recruit and screen patients with pancreatic cancer to perform molecular profiling, evaluation of circulating biomarkers and to enable enrolment to clinical studies to accelerate therapeutic development for pancreatic cancer. The PRIMUS studies are a series of clinical trials with novel design to answer specific therapeutic questions with a selection biomarker. 

The Precision-Panc Platform is a way to accelerate stratified therapeutic development through a combination of pre-clinical work, clinical trials and discovery. As part of the platform there will be a suite of clinical trials – the aim is to have a trial for each indication of pancreatic cancer in the future. 

At present 3 trials are recruiting: 

1. Precision-Panc Master Protocol:  Allows for the taking or release of diagnostic tissue from a patient’s tumour to allow for sequencing.  Patients are followed up on this protocol for basic survival information until death (currently recruiting).
2. PRIMUS 001:  A randomised  phase II randomised study looking at FOLFOX-A versus AG in the first line metastatic setting (currently recruiting).
3. PRIMUS 002:  A phase II study in patients with resectable or borderline resectable disease looking at FOLFOX-A and AG in the neo-adjuvant setting (currently recruiting). 
4. PRIMUS 004:  PRIMUS 004 will be a platform trial of biomarker direction novel second line treatments in metastatic pancreatic cancer.  The first appendix of this trial will be looking at olaparib and AZD6738 (due to open Q1 2020).
5. PRIMUS 005 (STAR-PAC2): A phase IIb randomised clinical trial repurposing ATRA as a stromal targeting agent in a novel drug combination for locally advanced pancreatic cancer (due to open Q2 2020).

Project Goals and Expected Outcomes

Precision-Panc aims to make precision medicine a reality for people with pancreatic cancer by delivering the PRIMUS clinical trails through the NHS and gathering knowledge that will ultimately allow cancer specialists to match patients with the most suitable treatment for them.  The programme will also speed up drug development, improving access to new drugs and survival in patients with pancreatic cancer.

What gaps in existing knowledge will be addressed by the study?

Precision-Panc will be the first pancreatic study to sequence tumour samples for all potential trial patients and to collect information on all patients sequenced.  It will bring together the sequencing and clinical data for over 2000 pancreatic patients at different stages in their disease. This is important as it will allow for serial biopsies of patients tumours allowing information on how cancers evolve over time to be studied.  

Project Team

David Chang

Lead Investigator
University of Glasgow

Funding Organisations

Further Information

Project Website