Patients were followed until surgery, death, or loss

to follow-up. Only 11 of 52 patients (21% of the cohort) made it to surgery with their initial stent in place. The authors note that 7 of these patients had an initial plastic stent and 4 had metallic stents. The authors compared stent performance as a ratio of complications per month with indwelling stent, and found that the complication rate in plastic stents was nearly seven times higher than with metallic stents. The study by Adams et al. adds to the growing body of evidence to support the use of SEMS for malignant biliary obstruction in patients undergoing neoadjuvant therapy for pancreas cancer. The strengths of this study include the focus Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical specifically on this subset of patients and the ability to directly compare plastic and metal stent performance. The neoadjuvant Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical regimen and duration between stent placement and surgery is consistent with previous studies. Limitations of

the study include its retrospective design and the small number of patients who initially were treated with SEMS. The authors attempt to overcome the latter limitation by measuring the complication rate per stent, rather than per patient. While this shows a superior complication rate for a metallic stent versus a plastic stent, the authors do not fully describe how much of this time actually includes the Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical period Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical prior to surgery (including the neoadjuvant therapy itself), and how much includes the time following surgery for those 52% of patients who did not have a successful resection. It is notable that despite the superior performance of SEMS described by Adams et al., the complication rate for stents during neoadjuvant Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical therapy remains quite high. Seven of the 43 patients with an initial plastic stent made it to surgery without a stent exchange (either planned

or unplanned). Of the patients with initial placement of SEMS, only 4 of 9 made it to surgery with their initial stent. Both results are disappointing and show a need for improved understanding of the factors that lead to complications in these patients. Metallic stents 17-DMAG (Alvespimycin) HCl may perform better in these patients, but there remains room for improvement. Is the question of plastic versus metal stents now settled in patients undergoing neoadjuvant therapy for SRT1720 pancreatic malignancy? While there is no randomized controlled head-to-head trial between plastic and metallic stents, the evidence thus far is overwhelmingly in favor of improved performance with SEMS. Given the known poor performance of plastic stents – combined with new evidence of the effectiveness of metallic stents – in this population, such a prospective comparison study may be difficult to justify. Obstacles still remain to the routine use of SEMS for distal biliary obstruction in the setting of presumed pancreatic cancer.