Menu
Back to Journals » Drug Design, Development and Therapy » Volume 10
Efficacy and safety of gemcitabine plus erlotinib for locally advanced or metastatic pancreatic cancer: a systematic review and meta-analysis
Authors Wang Y, Hu G, Zhang Q, Tang N, Guo J, Liu L, Han X, Wang X, Wang Z
Received 30 January 2016
Accepted for publication 31 March 2016
Published 13 June 2016 Volume 2016:10 Pages 1961—1972
DOI https://doi.org/10.2147/DDDT.S105442
Checked for plagiarism Yes
Review by Single anonymous peer review
Peer reviewer comments 2
Editor who approved publication: Prof. Dr. Wei Duan
Yuan Wang,1 Guo-fang Hu,1 Qian-qian Zhang,1 Ning Tang,1 Jun Guo,2 Li-yan Liu,2 Xiao Han,2 Xia Wang,2 Zhe-hai Wang2
1School of Medicine and Life Sciences, Shandong Academy of Medical Sciences, University of Jinan, 2Shandong Cancer Hospital, Shandong University, Jinan, Shandong, People’s Republic of China
Background: Pancreatic cancer is considered as a chemoresistant neoplasm with extremely dismal prognosis. Gemcitabine is recommended as the standard agent for locally advanced or metastatic pancreatic cancer. A series of trials have been conducted to improve the outcome of advanced pancreatic cancer with other anticancer drugs in combination with gemcitabine. Unfortunately, the designers of the clinical trials failed to improve the poor prognosis of patients with advanced pancreatic cancer. Erlotinib was the first additional drug that improved the overall survival of patients with advanced pancreatic cancer with gemcitabine. We performed this systematic review and meta-analysis to explore the efficacy and safety of the combination of gemcitabine with erlotinib (GemErlo) for patients with advanced pancreatic cancer using the currently available evidence.
Methods: PubMed/MEDLINE, EMBASE, the Cochrane Library, and relevant abstracts of major conferences were comprehensively searched. Data results on objective response rate, disease control rate, and 1-year survival were pooled by using MetaAnalyst with a random-effects model. Results on progression-free survival and overall survival were only summarized descriptively.
Results: A total of 24 studies with 1,742 patients with locally advanced or metastatic pancreatic cancer treated with GemErlo were included. Combined objective response rate was 14.4% (95% CI: 11.6%–17.7%), disease control rate was 55.0% (95% CI: 51.5%–58.5%), and 1-year survival rate was 28.5% (95% CI: 24.0%–33.4%). Progression-free survival ranged from 2.63 to 9.6 months, and overall survival varied from 6 to 10 months. As for the toxicity profile, the most common adverse events (AEs) were hematologic reactions, skin rash, and gastrointestinal reactions. Other severe AEs, which had low incidence, included treatment-induced death and interstitial lung disease.
Conclusion: Our study showed that GemErlo is associated with reasonable activity in treating patients with locally advanced or metastatic pancreatic cancer. Most of the AEs were tolerable, while some severe AEs needed careful detection.
Keywords: advanced pancreatic cancer, chemotherapy, targeted agent, meta-analysis
This work is published and licensed by Dove Medical Press Limited. The full terms of this license are available at https://www.dovepress.com/terms.php and incorporate the Creative Commons Attribution - Non Commercial (unported, v3.0) License.
By accessing the work you hereby accept the Terms. Non-commercial uses of the work are permitted without any further permission from Dove Medical Press Limited, provided the work is properly attributed. For permission for commercial use of this work, please see paragraphs 4.2 and 5 of our Terms.