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During the past 15 years, we have seen few therapeutic advances for patients with pancreatic cancer, the fourth leading cause of cancer-related death in the U.S. Currently, only about 6% of patients with advanced disease respond to standard gemcitabine therapy, and median survival is only about 6 months. Moreover, phase III trials have shown that adding various cytotoxic and targeted agents to gemcitabine fails to improve these outcomes. Now, two groups of investigators have conducted further phase III trials to evaluate the addition of cetuximab or bevacizumab to conventional gemcitabine therapy in this setting.
In the first study, researchers randomized 745 patients with advanced pancreatic cancer to receive gemcitabine (1000 mg/m2 weekly …