PD-1 immunotherapy in pancreatic cancer: current status

Abstract. Pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma is the known kind of tumor biologically featured as high malignant degree, lack of effective methods for diagnosis and treatment, which reflects its unpleasant prognosis. Recently, with the breakthrough of burgeoning therapeutic methods, the flush of dawn for pancreatic cancer nearly arrives. Nowadays, besides surgery, neoadjuvant chemoradiotherapy, tumor vaccine therapy, and immunotherapy all show their active situation and obtain certain clinical efficacy, but that is still limited to pancreatic cancer. However, the appearance and development of programmed cell death-1 (PD-1) immune checkpoint inhibitor may final improve survival of pancreatic cancer. This article aims to deeply understand the value of PD-1 immune checkpoint inhibitor in pancreatic cancer and validly provide the evidence for treatment by means of performing a systematic review on the current status in the fields of the mechanism and application of anti-PD-1 in pancreatic cancer, associations with surgery, PD-1-related side effects and prospections