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Pancreatic cancer is a highly aggressive and notoriously difficult to treat. As the vastmajority of patients are diagnosed at advanced stage of the disease, only a small population is curative by surgical resection. Although gemcitabine-based chemotherapy is typically offered as standard of care, most patients do not survive longer than 6 months. Thus, new therapeutic approaches are needed. Pancreatic cancer cells that develop gemcitabine resistance would still be suitable targets for immunotherapy. Therefore, one promising treatment approach may be immunotherapy that is designed to target pancreatic-cancer-associated antigens. In this paper, we detail recent work in immunotherapy and the advances in concept of combination therapy of immunotherapy and chemotherapy. We offer our perspective on how to increase the clinical efficacy of immunotherapies for pancreatic cancer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We designed a phase 1 study using dendritic cells (DCs) pulsed with a mixture of three types of Wilms’ tumor 1 (WT1) peptides, including MHC class I/II restricted epitopes (DC/WT1-I/II). Our recent work reveals that the combination of DC/WT1-I/II and chemotherapy induced long-term WT1-specific CD4+and CD8+T cell responses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]