Interventional Approaches for Locally Advanced Pancreatic Cancer

Ripal Gandhi, MD, FSVM, Miami Cardiac and Vascular Institute, Florida, discusses the new and upcoming approaches for treating locally advanced pancreatic cancer. Dr Gandhi touches on both intra-arterial and transvenous techniques and the specific catheters necessary for them.

Transcript:

Hi, my name is Ripal Gandhi, I'm an interventional radiologist at the Miami Cardiac and Vascular Institute and the Miami Cancer Institute. I'm here at CIO and one of my talks is on treatment of locally advanced pancreatic cancer.

One of the things with pancreatic cancer is, we haven't made a lot of advancements in quite a long time. There are some new therapies, specifically intra-arterial approach to pancreatic cancer utilizing a specific catheter called the Renovo catheter, and we're involved in a phase 3 randomized clinical trial called TIGeR-PaC. That’s definitely a key aspect of that presentation. Also at the end of that presentation, I'll talk about transvenous approaches to pancreatic cancer, and that's kind of a novel approach utilizing a special catheter from Trisalus Life Sciences, and we'll talk about that and potential benefits of that approach as well.

Right now, when we're talking about locally advanced pancreatic cancer, we're looking at overall survivals which are certainly less than 2 years. Our goal is ideally to extend these patients' lives while maintaining their quality of life. We don't want to do anything that's going to compromise their quality of life. Looking at some of the earlier studies, looking at the intra-arterial approach to pancreatic cancer, a study showed when chemotherapy was given intra-arterially in combination with radiation therapy, you had overall survivals of over 2 years, a pretty impressive survival for this patient population. Really the goal here is to extend these patients' lives.

A secondary goal, which isn't really the primary goal of the study, but would be potentially to downstage patients such that they could actually get a resection to remove the pancreatic cancer.