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Pancreatic cancer remains a deadly disease with a 5-year survival rate of only 8%. Even after surgical resection, most patients have recurrence of their cancer. Over the last 10 years, improvements in chemotherapy regimens led to a doubling in median overall survival. Here we review the management of advanced pancreatic cancer and highlight vaccine therapy as a novel modality of treatment.

Pancreatic cancer is the third leading cause of cancer related death and by 2030, it will be second only to lung cancer. We have seen tremendous advances in therapies for lung cancer as well as other solid tumors using a molecular targeted approach but our progress in treating pancreatic cancer has been incremental with median overall survival remaining less than one year. There is an urgent need for improved therapies with better efficacy and less toxicity. Small molecule inhibitors, monoclonal antibodies and immune modulatory therapies have been used. Here we review the progress that we have made with these targeted therapies.

The goal of this study is to characterize the genomic and immune profiles of metaplastic breast cancer (MpBC) and identify the association with survival through an analysis of archived tumor tissue. A next-generation sequencing-based mutational assay (Onco-48) was performed for 21 MpBC patients. Clinicopathologic characteristics were captured, including relapse free survival (RFS) and overall survival (OS). Immunohistochemistry (IHC) for CD3, CD4, CD8, and programmed death-ligand 1 (PD-L1) was also performed. Recurrence free survival (RFS) at 5 years was 57% (95% CI 0.34–0.75) and overall survival (OS) at 5 years was 66% (95% CI 0.41–0.82). The most commonly altered genes were TP53 (68.4%, 13/19), PIK3CA (42.1%, 8/19), and PTEN (15.8%, 3/19. For patients with PIK3CA mutations, RFS and OS were significantly worse than for those without (HR 5.6, 95% CI 1.33–23.1 and HR 8.0, 95% CI 1.53–41.7, respectively). Cox regression estimated that PD-L1 expression was associated with worse RFS and OS (HR 1.08, 95% CI 1.01–1.16 and HR 1.05, 95% CI 1.00–1.11, respectively, for an absolute increase in PD-L1 expression of 1%). In conclusion, PIK3CA mutation and PD-L1 expression confer poor prognosis in this cohort of patients with MpBC.

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