Neoadjuvant PRRT With Y-90-DOTATOC in pNET

Plain-language summary

Neuroendocrine tumors (NETs) are relatively rare tumors, mainly originating from the digestive system, that tend to be slow growing and are often diagnosed when metastatic. Surgery is the sole curative option, but is feasible only in a minority of patients. Peptide Receptor Radionuclide Therapy (PRRT) has been experimented for almost 20 years and is an established effective therapeutic modality for well/moderately differentiated, inoperable or metastasized gastro-entero-pancreatic (GEP) and bronchial NETs. Clinical studies demonstrated that partial and complete objective responses can be obtained in up to 30% of patients. Side effects may involve the kidneys and the bone marrow and are usually mild. Renal protection is used to minimize the risk of a late decrease of renal function. A new application for P-NETs is preoperative PRRT. Since surgery is the only curative option for GEPNETs, preoperative PRRT could increase the efficacy of surgery. However, this modality has not been fully explored in dedicated studies and there are just few sporadic case reports that described the preoperative use of PRRT in pancreatic NETs who could then be operated on successfully. Moreover there are few experiences demonstrating the advantage of PRRT associated to surgery in a multidisciplinary setting. In addition, the possibility of detecting the circulating NET transcripts by means of transcriptome analysis could represent an early marker of response to PRRT and improve the patient management. Aim of this study is to evaluate the response and rate of R0 surgery in patients with unresectable or borderline resectable PNETs eligible to PRRT with 90Y-DOTATOC and correlate the response to the variation in circulating NET transcripts measured before and after the end of PRRT. It has been recently shown that a PCR-based 51 transcript signature is significantly more sensitive and efficient than single analytes (e.g. CgA) in NET diagnosis and follow up. 30 patients will be enrolled in the study; each of them will receive 1.85 GBq/cycle of 90Y-DOTATOC with a cumulative activity of 9.25-11.1 GBq in 5-6 cycles (depending on personalized dosimetry). Therapy response will be assessed by morphological (CT/MRI) and functional (PET/CT or Octreoscan) imaging after 3 and 6 months from the completion of PRRT and compared with transcript analysis. Based on literature reports we expect a response rate of about 35% of patients.

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