A study looking at a new treatment plan for locally advanced cancer of the pancreas (PERU)

Cancer type:

Pancreatic cancer

Status:

Results

Phase:

Phase 2

This study looked at giving a

GemCap chemotherapy
followed by capecitabine and radiotherapy
with or without cetuximab

More about this trial

If you had cancer of the pancreas that had spread to surrounding tissue but not to other parts of the body, you may have had gemcitabine, or a combination of gemcitabine and capecitabine called GemCap.

If this helped, you may then have had radiotherapy. And you may have had capecitabine at the same time. Chemotherapy and radiotherapy together is called chemoradiation Open a glossary item .

In this study everyone who benefited from GemCap had it followed by chemoradiation. But half the people also had the drug cetuximab during radiotherapy.

Cetuximab is a type of biological therapy called a monoclonal antibody. Monoclonal antibodies can seek out cancer cells by looking for particular proteins.

The main aim of this study was to see which treatment plan worked best for people with locally advanced pancreatic cancer.

Summary of results

While this study was going on another trial called LAP 07 published its results. LAP 07 showed there was no benefit to having chemotherapy followed by chemoradiation for locally advanced pancreatic cancer. And this had an impact on what the PERU study was looking at.

Having considered the LAP 07 results the people who oversaw the study (the Data Monitoring Committee) decided to close the PERU study.

We have based this summary on information from the research team. The information they sent us has been reviewed by independent specialists (peer reviewed Open a glossary item ) and published in a medical journal. The figures we quote above were provided by the trial team who did the research. We have not analysed the data ourselves.