Nordic Pancreatic Cancer Trial (NorPACT) - 1

Pancreatic cancer is the fourth leading cause of cancer-related deaths in Europe and the United States. Surgical resection remains the only potentially curative treatment. However, the median survival of patients undergoing pancreatic resection alone is 16-23 months. The administration of adjuvant chemotherapy leads to an improvement in overall survival. Thus, completion of multimodality treatment (MMT) is the ideal goal and standard of care for treatment of pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC). Currently, the surgery-first (SF) strategy is the most universally accepted approach to resectable PDAC (and is the standard of care in Norway), but the optimal sequence of surgery and chemotherapy remains unclear. The purpose of this study is to further investigate the additional efficacy of neoadjuvant chemotherapy to the standard treatment for resectable cancer of the pancreatic head (surgery followed by adjuvant chemotherapy).