Safety and Efficacy of Irreversible Electroporation for Locally Advanced Pancreatic Cancer

Pancreatic cancer is 5th leading cause of cancer-related death in Korea. It has a dismal prognosis with very low 5-year survival rate, about 5%. Only 10% of pancreatic cancer patients is diagnosed in operable status. So, most of patients could not be treated with curative resection.

Locally advanced pancreatic cancer (LAPC) is defined by defined as surgically unresectable due to vascular encasement (e.g. celiac trunk or superior mesenteric artery) by tumor, but have no evidence of distant metastases. In LAPC patients, systemic chemotherapy with/without radiotherapy was used as a standard therapy, but therapeutic response was very poor. Only less than 30% of patients showed treatment response, and median survival of LAPC patient was only 9 months. Thus, more effective treatment modality is needed for LAPC patients.

Irreversible electroporation (IRE) is a soft tissue ablation technique using ultra short but strong electrical fields to create permanent and hence lethal nanopores in the cell membrane, to disrupt the cellular homeostasis. IRE does not cause thermally induced necrosis and has tissue selectivity, so adjacent tissue or vascular structures can be preserved.

Several clinical trials using IRE were performed to liver, kidney or lung cancer patients. We will operate IRE procedure to LAPC patients who were previously received standard therapy but showed no response, using NanoKnife IRE device. We will investigate treatment response and safety of IRE.