How the PRECEDE Consortium is Redefining Pancreatic Cancer Detection

The PRECEDE Consortium provides a standardized, large-scale infrastructure for the early detection of pancreatic cancer, addressing a clinical landscape where five-year survival rates have remained stagnant at 13%, according to Diane Simeone, MD. This 13% 5-year survival rate was noted in a study published by American Cancer Society, which also showed that across all combined cancer types, the 5-year survival rate was 70%.¹

By prioritizing global data sharing over traditional academic silos, the PRECEDE Consortium aims to shift the diagnosis of pancreatic cancer toward earlier, resectable stages. The consortium was stablished as a response to the failure of previous individual-led strategies to improve survival outcomes, and a central pillar of the PRECEDE model is the requirement for participating centers to share data transparently.

The consortium currently includes 65 centers that operate multidisciplinary clinics for patients at high risk. These sites utilize standardized protocols for data collection across all global sites; biospecimen procurement, including blood and available tissue for research; and imaging standardization to ensure consistency in longitudinal surveillance.

Originally designed as a 10,000-patient study, the initiative has surpassed its initial goal and is now targeting 20,000 patients. Simeone anticipates that at least 1200 participants within the study will develop pancreatic cancer. For these patients, the hope is that their disease will be caught at earlier stages. This early detection is critical for surgical eligibility, as the resection of early-stage disease significantly increases the likelihood of saving a patient’s life.

Transcript:

What is the PRECEDE Consortium?

This is something that we came up with because the strategy that was being used for early detection of pancreas cancer was not working, and the strategy to improve survival for pancreas cancer isn’t working. We’re still stuck at 13%. It was 13% last year. It was 12% the year before that. If we think about changing our strategy, I’ve tried to make some points that scaling up—going big—but setting a new precedent that if we’re going to have people work together, a grounding principle is they have to be willing to share data. The truth of the matter is that academia doesn’t necessarily favor sharing of data. It’s a bit more about individual accomplishment. We know that there are going to be breakthroughs by individuals working on projects, but for this problem that approach hasn’t worked. We wanted to go about in a different strategy.

For PRECEDE, what we said is, “Let’s get centers that want to work together, that will set up, that have an effort, and a multidisciplinary clinic where they’re seeing patients at high risk”. Then, if they can, layer on the collecting of data in a standardized way across all the sites. Then we have standardization for collection of blood and, when available, tissue for research and the standardization of imaging. If you take that basic concept—and we started thinking about this in 2019, with the first patient at the first center in May 2020 in the middle of the pandemic—now we have 65 centers all doing this the same way. [There are] monthly meetings where we review all the data, new diagnostics, and new approaches.

We started off planning to have a 10,000-patient study. We’ve surpassed 10,000; we’re now shooting for 20,000 patients. Of these patients, there are different categories of risk. We anticipate that at least 1200 patients in our study will get pancreatic cancer. The good thing is, when someone’s in screening, it’s way more likely that we will find [the disease] early. The data in high-performing centers like ours is, with screening over 9 times out of 10 we will find a stage I pancreatic cancer. The likelihood is we’re going to help save that patient’s life by resecting that very early-stage cancer.

References

Siegel RL, Kratzer TB, Wagle NS, Sung H, Jemal A. Cancer statistics, 2026. CA Cancer J Clin. 2026;76(1):e70043. doi:10.3322/caac.70043