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There is no prospective, randomised head-to-head trial comparing first-line FOLFIRINOX and gemcitabine/nab-paclitaxel in advanced pancreatic cancer. We assess real-world effectiveness and quality of life (QoL) of both regimens using a new prognostic score. This analysis includes 1540 patients with advanced pancreatic cancer from the prospective, clinical cohort study Tumour Registry Pancreatic Cancer separated into learning (n = 1027) and validation sample (n = 513). The Pancreatic Cancer Score (PCS) was developed using multivariate Cox regression. We compared overall survival (OS) and time to deterioration (TTD) for longitudinal QoL between first-line FOLFIRINOX (n = 407) and gemcitabine/nab-paclitaxel (n = 655) according to patients' prognostic risk, after inverse probability of treatment weighting (IPTW) by propensity score analysis. The PCS includes nine independent prognostic factors for survival: female sex, BMI ≥24/unknown, ECOG performance status ≥1, Charlson comorbidity index ≥1, tumour staging IV/unknown at primary diagnosis, liver metastases, bilirubin >1.5× upper limit of normal (ULN), leukocytes >ULN and neutrophil-to-lymphocyte ratio ≥4. Median OS of the validation sample was 11.4 (95% confidence interval [CI]: 10.4-14.4), 8.5 (95% CI: 6.8-9.6) and 5.9 months (95% CI: 4.0-7.4) for favourable- (0-3 risk factors), intermediate- (4-5 factors) and poor-risk group (6-9 factors), respectively. After IPTW, only poor-risk patients had significantly longer median OS and TTD of overall QoL with FOLFIRINOX (OS: 6.9 months, 95% CI: 3.9-13.3; TTD: 10.6 months, 95% CI: 2.0-14.1) vs gemcitabine/nab-paclitaxel (OS: 4.0 months, 95% CI: 2.8-4.8; TTD: 4.1 months, 95% CI: 2.4-4.5). Our novel PCS may facilitate treatment decisions in clinical routine of advanced pancreatic cancer, since only poor-risk, but not favourable-risk patients, seem to benefit from intensified treatment with FOLFIRINOX., (© 2022 The Authors. International Journal of Cancer published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of UICC.)