Impact of Endoscopic Ultrasound-Guided Tissue Acquisition on Decision-Making in Precision Medicine for Pancreatic Cancer: Beyond Diagnosis
Hiroshi Imaoka, Mitsuhito Sasaki, Yusuke Hashimoto, Kazuo Watanabe, Shoichi Miyazawa, Taro Shibuki, Shuichi Mitsunaga, Masafumi Ikeda
Abstract
Precision medicine in cancer treatment refers to targeted therapy based on the evaluation of biomarkers. Although precision medicine for pancreatic cancer (PC) remains challenging, novel biomarker-based therapies, such as pembrolizumab, olaparib, and entrectinib, have been emerging. Most commonly, endoscopic ultrasound-guided tissue acquisition (EUS-TA) had been used for the diagnosis of PC until now. However, advances in EUS-TA devices and biomarker testing, especially next-generation sequencing, have opened up the possibility of sequencing of various genes even in limited amounts of tissue samples obtained by EUS-TA, and identifying potential genetic alterations as therapeutic targets. Precision medicine benefits only a small population of patients with PC, but biomarker-based therapy has shown promising results in patients who once had no treatment options. Now, the role of EUS-TA has extended beyond diagnosis into decision-making regarding the treatment of PC. In this review, we mainly discuss tissue sampling by EUS-TA for biomarker testing and the current status of precision medicine for PC.