Is Immunotherapy the Holy Grail for Pancreatic Cancer?

Novel approaches to trigger the immune system against cancer have recently gained much attention. The pioneers within the field, James Allison (MD Anderson Cancer Center, USA) and Tasuku Honjo (Kyoto University, Japan), were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2018 for their breakthrough research on CTLA-4 and PD-1/PD-L1, respectively. These contributions have been fundamental for the development of immune checkpoint blockade drugs and have transformed the treatment of patients with advanced melanoma and several other tumors [1–3]. Given the success of immunotherapy in several solid tumors, the question remains whether immunotherapy is also an option in a recalcitrant tumor such as pancreatic cancer?

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