other thoughts:
regarding UCSF vs Standford vs CPMC -- there is no answer. Your experience will very much depend on the people you deal with. Tell someone "I'm being treated at Stanford" and you may hear a "wow" response ... being that Stanford is rated as a prominent cancer treatment center. But a friend of mine has a very different view on that, after a few years of being treated at Stanford. She had many stories. One of the things she told me --- a few times she was hospitalized for absolutely terrible side effects from radiation and chemo, and she said her doctors "would come out of the woodworks". She had doctors for everything, and they would all do their rounds while she was drugged in the hospital bed. How they all even knew she was there beat her. What was her dermatologist doing checking on her when she was admitted for nausea and other non-skin complaints? Answer: To get the commission. It made her angry. Oncologists make money on the marking-up and administering of chemo. Did you know an oncologist can make $150K or more a year through that alone. She discovered this for herself. She was in love with one or two of her doctors, but just because you go to a prominent or expensive facility, it doesn't mean you will be immune to these types of things.
Regarding clinical studies, you should know that something in the order of 19 out of 20 studies fail. Drug companies spend millions on developing a drug and have a massive financial interest in getting it to the public. Before doing so, they must run it through clinical studies on patients such as your husband. Often a drug that shows promise in theory and even in animal studies has very poor results in practice on humans and often with extreme side effects. A failed drug is often combined with another drug, one that has passed it's patented lifespan. I have seen dozens of reports on highly toxic, multi-agent chemotherapy trials that went nowhere and wound up killing some of the trial patients due to toxicity. There is also fierce competition for clinical trial participants, and many doctors are paid a commission to enroll patients. This is well documented in Ralph Moss's moss reports, which I highly recommend.
On your specific query of Gemzar+Tarceva vs Gemzar+Kanglaite, I cannot answer. Multi-agent chemotherapy involving gemzar + <something> is common for pancreatic cancer ... the reason being that pancreatic cancer is a particularly aggressive cancer that responds very poorly to chemo. It is incredibly unlikely that your husband will get involved in a clinical trial on the brink of a new discovery. They have been developing and trying chemo drugs for, what 40+ years. There are very very few successes in that time.
Have you asked your oncologist why Pancreatic cancer is so aggressive? I'm sure they cannot give you a good answer. I've got one. Of course, anything read on the internet, especially on a forum by a well intentioned individual should be taken with a really large grain of salt .. to the point of almost complete dismissal. So please do so, and do your OWN research. In any case, my answer is ...
the primary purpose of the pancreas is to produce proteolytic enzymes that are dumped into the small intestine to break down foods. A diseased pancreas (assuming it is diseased in the enzyme production part of the pancreas) is obviously not going to produce enzymes as well as it normally would. So what is left is an excellent environment for cancer to flourish, if you believe in the Trophoblast theory of cancer:
The similarity between trophoblast cells and cancer is only recently widely accepted in the cancer research world. This was discovered and that work almost lost some 100 years ago by Dr John Beard who found that pancreatic enzymes were the key to controlling placental growth (trophoblast cells), postulated the similarities to cancer and found with clinical experience that enzymes also controlled cancer. Injectable pancreatic enzymes were used at the time. Since the 1970s or so, studies have proven that enzymes taken orally survive acids of the stomach and unused enzymes are absorbed by the small intestine and recycled back via the blood stream into the pancreas in a similar way bile salts are.
So one answer why pancreatic cancer is so deadly, is that that particular disease limits pancreatic enzyme production, which is a natural cancer controller. Nothing in medicine is this simple of course.
Another interesting fact is that most cancers will elevate HCG levels in people. HCG is a hormone that is elevated during pregnancy, and is the hormone detected by the common OTC prenancy test. Google HCG and testicular cancer, and you may be shocked to know that men with testicular cancer can pee on one of these pregnancy test kits and register positive. We tried this with our family relative who has lung cancer, and to our shock at the time, the result was positive. It is reported that most OTC tests are not sensitive enough to detect levels in many cancer patients, though some doctors do use this blood marker in cancer testing.
So why is this? Well .. trophoblast cells (which invade tissue (the uteral wall etc), form blood supplies (angiogenesis) and proliferate happen to produce HCG. That's why it's a pregnancy test. And gee... cancer, which invades other tissues, forms blood supplies and proleferates also produces HCG. Hmm. Of course, again I am simplifying, but this is just another well known fact - that supports the trophoblast theory of cancer.
Look into it. If you need help (I have some good stuff on it), send me a private message.