Chemotherapy for advanced pancreatic cancer: Past, present, and future

Advanced pancreatic cancer is a devastating illness characterized by significant morbidity and a brief median survival. Although standard chemotherapy with gemcitabine achieves only modest improvements in survival and quality of life, classic cytotoxic agents, such as 5-fluorouracil, pemetrexed, irinotecan, exatecan, cisplatin, or oxaliplatin, given alone or in combination with gemcitabine, have not proved superior. Thus, more recent trials have...