Chemoradiotherapy in the treatment of regional pancreatic carcinoma: a phase II study.

In locally advanced pancreatic cancer, the utilization of chemotherapy and radiotherapy is increasing, although in view of the reported long-term results of several contemporary trials, further improvements are certainly needed. Encouraging results using the combination of cisplatin, cytarabine, caffeine, and continuous infusion (CI) 5-fluorouracil (5-FU) (PACE) for the treatment of advanced pancreatic carcinoma prompted a phase II study using PACE followed by external beam radiotherapy with CI of 5-FU (PACE-RT) for localized disease. Forty-one patients were treated with PACE-RT as adjuvant therapy after surgical resection (21 patients), or as primary therapy for locally advanced, unresectable disease (20 patients), with reevaluation for resection after completion of treatment.

Clinicopathologic analysis of pancreatic adenocarcinoma in African Americans and Caucasians.

Introduction: African Americans have a higher incidence of pancreatic adenocarcinoma than do Caucasians for unknown reasons. Whether other clinicopathologic differences exist between these two groups is not known. This study was undertaken to compare the clinical, pathologic, and biologic findings for a group of patients with a histologic diagnosis of pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma of the usual type in a single institution.

Molecular mechanism(s) of actinomycin-D induced sensitization of pancreatic cancer cells to CD95 mediated apoptosis.

The death receptor CD95 transduces apoptotic death signaling in many cell types. However, in pancreatic tumor cells CD95 mediated apoptotic machinery is blocked by unknown protein(s). We and others have recently demonstrated that actinomycin-D (ActD) treatment induces sensitization of pancreatic cancer cells as well as other cell types to CD95 mediated apoptosis.