Surgical outcomes and rate of pathological response in resectable/borderline resectable pancreatic cancer patients undergoing neoadjuvant gemcitabine/nab-paclitaxel versus FOLFIRINOX: A retrospective institutional analysis.

Abstract

e16247 Background: Pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) remains one of the most lethal solid tumors, predicted to become the second leading cause of cancer related death in some regions of the world. It often presents at an advanced stage, which contributes to poor five-year survival rates of 2%-9%, ranking firmly last amongst all cancer sites in terms of prognostic outcomes for patients. Only about 20% of the cases are diagnosed early enough to undergo surgical resection leading to complete remission. While chemotherapy has an established role in the setting of metastatic disease, utilizing it in the neo-adjuvant setting has been adopted by most institutes for resectable/ borderline resectable cases. Ongoing trials are exploring the use of different regimens in the neo-adjuvant setting. The aim of our study was to identify patients with resectable/borderline resectable PDAC undergoing neoadjuvant chemotherapy and differences in surgical outcome based on the regimen received i.e gemcitabine/ nab-Paclitaxel vs FOLFIRINOX. Methods: A retrospective review was conducted of all patients diagnosed with PDAC from 2017-2019 at Allegheny General Hospital. Data analysis was completed using IBM SPSS v23. Summary statistics were presented using percentages for categorical variables and medians with interquartile ranges for continuous variables. Results: Out of 121 patients who received and completed treatment in our institution, 30 underwent neoadjuvant chemotherapy treatment followed by surgical intervention. 21 (70%) patients were found to be borderline resectable, 8 (27%) patients were resectable and 1 patient had locally advanced PDAC. 16 (53%) patients received FOLFIRINOX compared to 13 (43%) patients received gem/nab-paclitaxel. Among patients who received neoadjuvant FOLFIRINOX, 5 out of 16 (31%) patients had moderate to significant treatment response at the time of surgery compared to 7 out of 13 (54%) patients who received gemcitabine/nab-paclitaxel. Conclusions: Our study revealed no significant difference (p=0.21) between the patients who received neoadjuvant gemcitabine/nab-paclitaxel vs FOLFIRINOX in terms of treatment response assessed pathologically at the time surgical resection. We recognize the limitations of our study in terms of it being a retrospective analysis with a small sample size and therefore further prospective and randomized controlled trials are needed to determine the most suitable and effective regimen in the neoadjuvant setting for resectable/borderline resectable PDAC patients. Response to treatment among different chemotherapy groups.[Table: see text]