ImiPaCe

Program Description

Pancreatic cancer is the 4th common cancer related disease in the western world. Whereas new drug regimens have improved outcome surgical removal of the tumour is the only curative option for this disease. Therefore, downstaging of the tumour is of utmost importance. CONKO-007 is an open-label, multicentre, phase III randomized clinical trial which has the rational whether induction chemotherapy with three cycles of gemcitabine or six cycles of FOLFIRINOX followed by concurrent chemoradiotherapy improves the prognosis of patients with unresectable, non-metastatic locally advanced pancreatic cancer (LAPC) compared to chemotherapy alone. The primary outcome of the study is overall survival. At the end of the trial in 2020 approximately 550 patients from Germany will have accomplished. From these patients, biopsies before treatment start are available for NGS analysis. Moreover, roughly 20% of these patients undergo surgical removal of the tumour.  Using Next Generation Sequencing (RNA-Seq and WES) we would like to address one of the most urging questions in pancreatic cancer therapy right now: How to select patients for a given therapeutic regimen.

Program Team

Christian Pilarsky, Prof. Dr.

Lead Investigator

Department of Surgery
Universitätsklinikum Erlangen

Further Information

Program WebsiteProgram Journal