A recent New England Journal of Medicine study indicates that post-surgical combination chemotherapy is more effective in patients with metastatic pancreatic cancer than the standard chemotherapy regimen. Researchers in Canada and France administered the combination chemotherapy, a modified FOLFIRINOX regimen, to 238 randomly selected eligible study participants and compared their outcomes to 243 participants receiving the standard post-surgical treatment, gemcitabine. On average, patients in the FOLFIRINOX group had 21.6 months of disease-free survival compared to 12.8 months in the gemcitabine group. In an Oncology Times article, MSK’s Dr. Alice Wei calls the study “practice changing.” The article notes that the chemotherapy regimen is not suitable for all pancreatic cancer patients, and that the combination chemotherapy can have more side effects.