title: Is metastatic pancreatic cancer an untargetable malignancy?
abstract: Metastatic pancreatic cancer (MPC) is one of the most aggressive malignancies, known to be chemo-resistant and have been recently considered resistant to some targeted therapies (TT). Erlotinib combined to gemcitabine is the only targeted therapy that showed an overall survival benefit in MPC. New targets and therapeutic approaches, based on new-TT, are actually being evaluated in MPC going from immunotherapy, epigenetics, tumor suppressor gene and oncogenes to stromal matrix regulators. We aim in this paper to present the major causes rendering MPC an untargetable malignancy and to focus on the new therapeutic modalities based on TT in MPC.
authors.affiliation: Hampig Raphael Kourie, Joseph Gharios, Fadi Elkarak, Joelle Antoun, Marwan Ghosn, Department of Oncology, Faculty of Medicine, Saint Joseph University, Beirut, Lebanon.
authors.forename: Hampig Raphael
authors.initials: HR
authors.lastname: Kourie
authors.affiliation: Hampig Raphael Kourie, Joseph Gharios, Fadi Elkarak, Joelle Antoun, Marwan Ghosn, Department of Oncology, Faculty of Medicine, Saint Joseph University, Beirut, Lebanon.
authors.forename: Joseph
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Gharios
authors.affiliation: Hampig Raphael Kourie, Joseph Gharios, Fadi Elkarak, Joelle Antoun, Marwan Ghosn, Department of Oncology, Faculty of Medicine, Saint Joseph University, Beirut, Lebanon.
authors.forename: Fadi
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Elkarak
authors.affiliation: Hampig Raphael Kourie, Joseph Gharios, Fadi Elkarak, Joelle Antoun, Marwan Ghosn, Department of Oncology, Faculty of Medicine, Saint Joseph University, Beirut, Lebanon.
authors.forename: Joelle
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Antoun
authors.affiliation: Hampig Raphael Kourie, Joseph Gharios, Fadi Elkarak, Joelle Antoun, Marwan Ghosn, Department of Oncology, Faculty of Medicine, Saint Joseph University, Beirut, Lebanon.
authors.forename: Marwan
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Ghosn
keywords: Epigenetics; Immunotherapy; Pancreatic cancer; Targeted therapies; Tumor suppressor genes