Early-Onset Pancreas Cancer: Clinical Descriptors, Genomics, and Outcomes

BACKGROUND Recent evidence suggests a rising incidence of cancer in younger individuals. Herein, we report the epidemiologic, pathologic, and molecular characteristics of a patient cohort with early-onset pancreas cancer (EOPC). METHODS Institutional databases were queried for demographics, treatment history, genomic results and outcomes. Overall survival (OS) from date of diagnosis was estimated using Kaplan-Meier method. RESULTS Four hundred and fifty patients with EOPC were identified at Memorial Sloan Kettering between 2008 and 2018. Median OS was 16.3 months (95% confidence interval [CI] = 14.6 to 17.7 months) in the entire cohort and 11.3 months (95% CI = 10.2 to 12.2 months) for patients with stage IV disease at diagnosis. One hundred and thirty-two (29.3% of the cohort) underwent somatic testing; 21 of 132 (15.9%) had RAS wild-type cancers with identification of several actionable alterations, including ETV6-NTRK3, TPR-NTRK1, SCLA5-NRG1 and ATP1B1-NRG1 fusions, IDH1 R132C mutation, and mismatch repair deficiency. One hundred and thirty-eight (30.7% of the cohort) underwent germline testing; 44 of 138 (31.9%) had a pathogenic germline variant (PGV) and 27.5% harbored alterations in cancer susceptibility genes. Of patients seen between 2015 and 2018, 30 of 193 (15.5%) had a pathogenic germline variant. Among 138 who underwent germline testing, those with a PGV had a reduced all-cause mortality compared to patients without a PGV controlling for stage and year of diagnosis (hazard ratio = 0.42, 95%CI = 0.26 to 0.69). CONCLUSIONS PGVs are present in a substantial minority of patients with EOPC. Actionable somatic alterations were identified frequently in EOPC, enriched in the RAS wild-type subgroup. These observations underpin the recent guidelines for universal germline testing and somatic profiling in pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma.