Background: Pancreatic cancer has become the third leading cause of cancer death with minimal improvements in outcome for over 40 years. Recent trials of therapies that target-defective DNA maintenance using poly (ADP-ribose) polymerase (PARP) inhibitors are showing promising results, yet invariably patients recur and succumb to disease. Mechanisms of resistance to platinum-based and PARP inhibitor therapy in other cancer types include secondary mutations, which restore the integrity of DNA repair through an increasing number of different mechanisms.
Methods: Here we present a case of a 63-year-old female patient with a germ line pathogenic BRCA2 mutation (6714 deletion) who developed pancreatic cancer and had an exceptional response to platinum and PARP inhibitor therapy. Through next-generation sequencing and clinical follow-up, we correlated tumour response and resistance to the BRCA2 mutational status in the tumour.
Results: Initially, the patient had an exceptional response to platinum and PARP inhibitor therapy, most likely due to the BRCA2 mutation. However, the primary lesion recurred while on PARP inhibitor therapy and contained a secondary mutation in BRCA2, which mostly likely restored BRCA2 function in PARP inhibitor-resistant tumour cells.
Conclusions: To our knowledge, this is the first report of a BRCA2 reversion mutation that conferred resistance to PARP inhibitor-based therapy in a pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma patient. Future studies are needed to understand this important mechanism of resistance and how it may impact the choice of therapy for patients with pancreatic cancer.