Evaluation of the High Intensity Focused Ultrasound (HIFU) Technique for Patients With Unresectable Pancreatic Tumor Treatment (PULS)

The PULS study is designed for patients with a locally advanced tumour of the pancreas (known as pancreatic adenocarcinoma) that has previously been treated with several cycles of chemotherapy and cannot be removed by surgery. Pancreatic adenocarcinomas are often diagnosed at an advanced stage and only 15% to 20% of patients are candidates for surgery to remove the tumour. In the remaining cases, around a third of patients have metastatic disease at the time of diagnosis. The remaining third have locally advanced pancreatic cancer. In these cases, chemotherapy with or without radiotherapy is the standard treatment. The low proportion of patients who can benefit from surgery and the poor response to chemotherapy make the development of new treatments vital and urgent. For locally advanced cancers, we want to develop and evaluate a new form of treatment based on a medical device using high intensity focused ultrasound (HIFU), after chemotherapy. HIFU is a recent technology that uses therapeutic ultrasound. All HIFU procedures currently performed are carried out using an extracorporeal approach. The aim of this research is therefore to assess the safety and efficacy of HIFU ablation of locally advanced pancreatic tumours. This trial is a two stages (phase I and II) open label non comparative study. The first step of this study is to evaluate the safety of the HIFU intervention on 3 to 6 patients included. Patients will be included one by one, with a safety committee after each intervention. The total number of patients included in phase I will depend on the complications rate : If no serious complications are observed among the first 3 patients treated, the phase II study can begin. If a serious complication is observed, 3 additional patients will be included in phase I. The transition to phase II will be effective if a maximum of 1 complication out of the 6 patients included is observed. In the other cases, if at least 2 serious complications are observed for 3 to 6 patients included, the study will be definitively stopped. The second step of this study is to evaluate the efficacy of the HIFU intervention on 26 patients including the patients of phase I. Each patient will be follow for two years after the HIFU intervention. Un update of vital status will be made annually until the last patient's last visit. Sample size was thus evaluated by analogy with an A'Hern's. If at least 14 successes are observed among 26 patients, HIFU treatment will be considered of interest.