I don't remember which med(s) he has been taking, but @stageivsurvivor is a living testament to continuing systemic treatment despite NED status.

The "NE" stands for "No Evidence," and one of my favorite quotes is, "Absence of Evidence is not Evidence of Absence!"

The Minimal/Microscopic Residual Disease can always come back to get you. In my case, the recurrence was below the threshold of detection on four circulating tumor DNA tests, until it wasn't.

A quick search turned up two interesting factoids quoted here:

1. "Median survival was 7.4 months among patients treated with Xeloda plus gemcitabine, compared to 6 months among patients treated with gemcitabine alone." -- This implies the presence of disease, but shows some effectiveness.

2. "Capecitabine (Xeloda ®) is currently the most biologically active oral fluoropyrimidine drug, and is widely used in adjuvant therapy for pancreatic cancer." https://classic.clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT03959150 -- This trial was on post-op, post-adjuvant therapy, NED patients, and was supposed to wrap up in June 2023. I haven't seen results or FDA approval decisions.

For "stable disease," there has been some research and discussion about maintenance therapies. Docs are considering a switch from my chemo (GemAbraxCis) to avoid worsening neuropathy, but I've been holding on as I'd rather avoid worsening cancer.

Dr. Eileen O'Reilly (MSKCC) has done some research in this, and found that patients with BRCA mutations who have been stable for ~16 weeks on a platinum-based therapy reach a "sweet spot" where it may be preferable to switch to (or add?) a PARP inhibitor like Olaparib (Lynparza), and noted better outcomes from switching before disease progression. Apparently, after the disease becomes resistant to platinum, it also becomes resistant to PARP inhibitors.

There's a short, 3-year old video of her discussing it here: https://www.onclive.com/view/dr-oreilly-on-the-utility-of-parp-inhibitors-in-pancreatic-cancer
By now, she may have newer data related to other DNA Damage Repair mutations like PALB and ATM, as well as other PARP inhibitors.