Patients with liver metastasis of pancreatic cancer have poor prognosis and few opportunities for surgery, and conventional radiochemotherapy lacks a satisfactory effect. As a new therapeutic strategy for tumor, immunotherapy fights against cancer by enhancing patients′ immune function and may thus become an effective treatment regimen for liver metastasis of pancreatic cancer. This article reviews the latest research advances in immunotherapy for liver metastasis of pancreatic cancer from the aspects of immunomodulator, monoclonal antibody, immune checkpoint inhibitor, adoptive cellular immunotherapy, and tumor vaccine and points out that a combined treatment regimen has a promising future in clinical application.

Intrahepatic cholangiocarcinoma (ICC) is the second most frequently occurring primary liver cancer. It has been reported that the causes of late diagnosis of ICC are a high degree of malignancy, early metastasis, and diffusion. Most patients visit the hospital because of jaundice or discomfort due to the surrounding compression. ICC commonly recurs after resection, and chemotherapy is not sensitive. Therefore, patients have a poor prognosis and a low survival rate. Currently, a multidisciplinary approach based on surgery is recommended for ICC patients who can undergo surgical excision, and local treatment combined with chemotherapy is the main com-prehensive treatment for patients with advanced ICC who cannot undergo surgical resection. In recent years, it has been found that immunotherapy can involve the autoimmune system to remove tumor cells, and molecular-targeted therapy can kill tumor cells by in-hibiting cell membrane surface molecules that promote tumorigenesis and development. At present, these two treatment modalities have become the research focus of ICC therapy, and progress has been made. The research status is reviewed in this paper.

Objective To investigate the clinical effect of simultaneous surgical resection of hepatic and pancreatic lesions versus systemic chemotherapy in treatment of resectable pancreatic cancer with liver metastasis (PCLM). Methods A retrospective analysis was performed for related data of the patients with PCLM who were admitted to Shengjing Hospital of China Medical University from January 2013 to May 2020, and the patients with resectable PCLM were screened out and then divided into surgery group and chemotherapy group. The propensity score matching (PSM) method was used to reduce the impact of data bias and confounding factors. The independent samples t -test or the Mann- Whitney U test was used for comparison of continuous data between two groups, and the chi-square test was used for comparison of categorical data between two groups. The Kaplan-Meier method was used to calculate survival time, and the log-rank test was used for evaluation. The univariate and multivariate Cox regression models were used to investigate the independent risk factors for survival. Results A total of 56 patients with resectable PCLM were screened out, with 33 patients in the surgery group and 23 patients in the chemotherapy group, and there were 15 patients in each group after PSM. The surgery group had a significantly shorter median overall survival time than the chemotherapy group before PSM (6.6 months vs 10.4 months, χ 2 =4.476, P =0.034) and after PSM (6.4 months vs 10.5 months, χ 2 =4.309, P =0.038). The multivariate Cox regression analysis showed that poorly differentiated tumor (hazard ratio [ HR ]=4.945, 95% confidence interval [ CI ]: 1.980-12.348, P =0.001) and absence of postoperative chemotherapy ( HR =3.670, 95% CI : 1.437-9.376, P =0.007) were independent risk factors for poor prognosis in patients with PCLM. Conclusion Compared with chemotherapy, simultaneous surgical resection of hepatic and pancreatic lesions fails to prolong the overall survival time of patients with resectable PCLM. Patients with poorly differentiated tumor and those without postoperative chemotherapy tend to have poor prognosis.