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Pancreatic acinar cell carcinoma (ACC) is a rare entity. Herein we present the case of a 50-year-old male patient with an unlimited mass on the pancreatic corpus and tail with peripancreatic effusion and multiple metastases in the liver and spleen. A liver biopsy showed a pancreatic ACC. The patient received 9 cycles of gemcitabine plus oxaliplatin (GEMOX regimen), which had to be stopped because of a persistent grade 2 neuropathy. A CT scan showed complete response after 14 years. At the age of 61 years, a localized prostatic cancer was diagnosed, treated by prostatectomy. The patient carried a BRCA2 mutation. None of the precedent case reports describe a chemosensibility to the GEMOX regimen. In spite of the lack of study in these patients, chemotherapy with oxaliplatin seems to be the most effective. Long survival can be expected.

Background:Selecting patients with ‘sufficient life expectancy' for Phase I oncology trials remains challenging. The Royal Marsden Hospital Score (RMS) previously identified high-risk patients as those with ⩾2 of the following: albumin <35 g l−1; LDH > upper limit of normal; >2 metastatic sites. This study developed an alternative prognostic model, and compared its performance with that of the RMS.Methods:The primary end point was the 90-day mortality rate. The new model was developed from the same database as RMS, but it used Chi-squared Automatic Interaction Detection (CHAID). The ROC characteristics of both methods were then validated in an independent database of 324 patients enrolled in European Organization on Research and Treatment of Cancer Phase I trials of cytotoxic agents between 2000 and 2009.Results:The CHAID method identified high-risk patients as those with albumin <33 g l−1 or ⩾33 g l−1, but platelet counts ⩾400.000 mm−3. In the validation data set, the rates of correctly classified patients were 0.79 vs 0.67 for the CHAID model and RMS, respectively. The negative predictive values (NPV) were similar for the CHAID model and RMS.Conclusion:The CHAID model and RMS provided a similarly high level of NPV, but the CHAID model gave a better accuracy in the validation set. Both CHAID model and RMS may improve the screening process in phase I trials.