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Pancreatic Cancer: Recent Progress of Drugs in Clinical Trials

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  • Theme: Celebrating Women in the Pharmaceutical Sciences
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Abstract

Pancreatic cancer is a highly malignant tumor and one of the primary causes of cancer-related death. Because pancreatic cancer is difficult to diagnose in the early course of the disease, most patients present with advanced lesions at the time of diagnosis, and only 20% of patients are eligible for surgery. Consequently, drug treatment has become extremely important. At present, the main treatment regimens for pancreatic cancer are gemcitabine and the FORFIRINOX and MPACT regimens. However, none of these regimens substantially improves the prognosis of patients with pancreatic cancer. Extensive efforts have been dedicated to the study of pancreatic cancer in recent years. With the development and clinical application of biological targeted drugs, the biological targeted treatment of tumors has been widely accepted. Therefore, this article used relevant clinical trial data to summarize the research progress of traditional chemotherapy drugs and biological targeted drugs for the treatment of pancreatic cancer.

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Funding

This work was supported by the National Science Foundation of China (Grant no. 81973249); the Shanghai Commission of science and technology (Grant no. 20S11905500); the National Science Foundation of China (Grant no. 81690263); the Foundation Program of Key Laboratory of Smart Drug Delivery of the Ministry of Education; the Shanghai Education Commission Major Project (2017-01-07-00-07- E00052).This research is helped by Clarivate Cortellis Drug Discovery Intelligence.

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Correspondence to Min Liu.

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Zhang, Z., Song, J., Xie, C. et al. Pancreatic Cancer: Recent Progress of Drugs in Clinical Trials. AAPS J 23, 29 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1208/s12248-021-00556-2

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