Inflammatory Cytokines and Radiotherapy in Pancreatic Ductal Adenocarcinoma

Pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) remains a therapeutic challenge in clinical oncology. Surgery is the only potentially curative treatment. However, the majority of PDAC patients present with locally advanced/unresectable or metastatic disease, where palliative multiagent chemotherapy is the first-line treatment with the therapeutic intent to delay progression and prolong survival. For locally advanced/unresectable pancreatic cancer patients who are treated with chemotherapy, consolidative radiotherapy in the form concurrent chemoradiation or stereotactic ablative radiotherapy improves locoregional control and pain/symptom control. To improve clinical outcomes of PDAC patients, there is a dire need for discoveries that will shed more light on the pathophysiology of the disease and lead to the development of more efficacious treatment strategies. Inflammatory cytokines are known to play a role in mediating tumor progression, chemoresistance, and radioresistance in PDAC. A PubMed search on published articles related to radiotherapy, inflammatory cytokines, and pancreatic cancer patients in the English language was performed. This article primarily focuses on reviewing the clinical literature that examines the association of inflammatory cytokines with clinical outcomes and the effects of radiotherapy on inflammatory cytokines in PDAC patients.