Omics Approaches in Pancreatic Adenocarcinoma

Abstract

Pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma, which represents 80% of pancreatic cancers, is mainly diagnosed when treatment with curative intent is not possible. Consequently, the overall five-year survival rate is extremely dismal-around 5% to 7%. In addition, pancreatic cancer is expected to become the second leading cause of cancer-related death by 2030. Therefore, advances in screening, prevention and treatment are urgently needed. Fortunately, a wide range of approaches could help shed light in this area. Beyond the use of cytological or histological samples focusing in diagnosis, a plethora of new approaches are currently being used for a deeper characterization of pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma, including genetic, epigenetic, and/or proteo-transcriptomic techniques. Accordingly, the development of new analytical technologies using body fluids (blood, bile, urine, etc.) to analyze tumor derived molecules has become a priority in pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma due to the hard accessibility to tumor samples. These types of technologies will lead us to improve the outcome of pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma patients.

Keywords: FFPE; body fluids; ctDNA; genomic; lipidomic; metabolomic; pancreatic adenocarcinoma; proteomic; tissue.

Figure 1

Protein functional interactome network for differentially expressed proteins identified in Pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) tissue; down-regulated proteins (A) and up-regulated proteins (B). Using STRING software, proteins are represented as nodes, and interactions with continuous lines representing functional association. The closets subsets of proteins share functionalities. In the figure, some functional pathways have been highlighted with color codes representing proteins that belong to the same pathway. Regulated exocytosis (red), mRNA metabolic process (green), ribosomal (purple), neutrophil degranulation (blue) and structural molecule activity (dark green).