Mayo Clinic is the right choice for someone seeking treatment for pancreatic cancer. As we've become more aggressive with how we treat pancreas cancer, we actually have also become more aggressive with helping people's quality of life improve.

Pancreatic adenocarcinoma is a cancer that comes from the digestive part of the pancreas. PDAC is sort of your garden variety pancreas cancer. It's the most common type of cancer of the pancreas. Pancreas cancer can often present with very non-specific symptoms — fatigue, loss of appetite, weight loss, nausea. Our therapies have dramatically improved. Our surgical intervention is much more aggressive than it used to be. Typically only about 10% to 15% of patients were ever considered for surgery, which is the only curative modality for pancreas cancer. We're now realizing that a lot of these patients can actually get the surgery with the more aggressive operation, where we actually take those blood vessels out and reconstruct them. We're the only center, pretty much on the planet, that does these extensive operations.

Mayo is one of the leaders in the totally neo-adjuvant approach, which means that we try chemotherapy as well as, potentially, the radiation, if the patient needs radiation, and then do the surgery afterwards. I think from a model of care, we approach this disease in a multidisciplinary fashion. Every person sitting at that table is a significant expert in the disease. Whether it be by aggressive surgery, different types of chemotherapy or immunotherapy, or the whole combination of everything, we want to see a longer survival for our pancreas cancer patients.

We don't go by standard of care, because the standard of care leads to what? A standard outcome. Patients don't want a standard outcome for pancreas cancer. They want a super standard, something beyond that. And that's what we're trying to offer. I truly think that there is hope to offer to people with pancreas cancer.