Having Your Cake and Eating It Too: Combining SBRT and Multi-agent Chemotherapy in Locally Advanced Pancreatic Cancer

We read with great interest the results of the LAP07 study comparing capecitabine-based chemoradiation with gemcitabine-based therapy for non-progressive locally advanced pancreatic cancer (LAPC), following four months of gemcitabine-based therapy. The results, consistent with previous data, showed that standard chemoradiation improves local control (LC) but not overall survival. In this brief editorial, we emphasize that LC may still be very important in LAPC, as up to 30% of patients with LAPC may die from locally progressive disease. This is particularly likely to be true as systemic therapies continue to improve in efficacy. We very briefly review the data in support of stereotactic body radiotherapy (SBRT) for LAPC, which has been shown to offer excellent LC with minimal late grade ≥ 2 toxicity rate in a recent multi-institutional phase II study. We underscore that  a short course of SBRT offers an expeditious alternative to a long course of chemoradiation, allowing the use of fully-intensive systemic therapy.