Project description:Background: Tumor stage predicts pancreatic cancer (PDAC) prognosis, but prolonged and short survivals have been described in patients with early-stage tumors. Circulating microRNA (miRNA) are an emerging class of suitable biomarkers for PDAC prognosis. Our aim was to identify whether serum miRNA signatures predict survival of early-stage PDAC. Methods: Se-rum RNA from archival 15 stage I-III PDAC patients and 4 controls was used for miRNAs ex-pression profile (Agilent microarrays). PDAC patients with comparable age, gender, diabetes, jaundice and surgery were classified according to survival: less than 14 months (7/15 pts, group A) and more than 22 months (8/15 pts, group B). Bioinformatic data analysis was performed by two-class Significance Analysis of Microarray (SAM) algorithm. Binary logistic regression analyses considering PDAC diagnosis and outcome as dependent variables, and ROC analyses were also performed. Results: 2549 human miRNAs were screened out. At SAM, 76 differen-tially expressed miRNAs were found among controls and PDAC (FDR = 0.4%), the large major-ity (50/76, 66%) of them being downregulated in PDAC with respect to controls. Six miRNAs were independently correlated with early PDAC, and among these, hsa-miR-6821-5p was asso-ciated with the best ROC curve area in distinguishing controls from early PDAC. Among the 71 miRNAs differentially expressed between groups A and B, the most significant were hsa-miR-3135b expressed in group A only, hsa-miR-6126 and hsa-miR-486-5p expressed in group B only. Eight miRNAs were correlated with the presence of lymph-node metastases; among these, hsa-miR-4669 is of potential interest. hsa-miR-4516, increased in PDAC and found as an independent predictor of survival, has among its putative targets a series of gens involved in key pathways of cancer progression and dissemination, such as Wnt and p53 signaling pathways. Conclusions: A series of serum miRNAs was identified as potentially useful for the early diag-nosis of PDAC, and for establishing a prognosis
Project description:Clinical signs and radiographic findings of PDAC and pancreatitis are often indistinguishable, highlighting the need of a PDAC biomarker to be insensitive to pancreatitis. Therefore we validated a biomarker signature of 17-genes in this gene expression data containing PDAC, non-tumor pancreatic and pancreatitis of fresh-frozen and formalin-fixed paraffin-embedded tissues.
Project description:To identify a robust diagnostic biomarker for PDAC, we used FF samples in a meta-analysis with five other publicly available data sets. The identified biomarker genes were subsequently validated in the remaining samples to test the detection performance of FFPE samples.
Project description:Pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) is the most common malignancy of the pancreas. Since early disease symptoms are undefined and specific biomarkers are lacking, about 80% of patients present with advanced, inoperable tumors that represent a daunting challenge. Therefore, new sensitive and minimally invasive diagnostic tools are required to detect pancreatic cancer. The miRNA has been emerged as promising cancer biomarkers for PDAC. Nowadays, have been identified several miRNAs in serum or plasma of PDAC patients. However, there are not many of common miRNAs between them, and not all the studies have compared the serum/ plasma expression with the corresponding miRNAs present in the pancreatic tumor tissue. Due to this and considering that PDAC is the seventh leading cause of cancer death in Mexico, we initially identified the miRNAs that are differentially expressed in tissue from PDAC patients residing in the Mexican Republic, to later find out which of these miRNAs are overexpressed in the serum of patients with this type of cancer. In this way, nine common miRNAs were identified in tissue and serum of PDAC patients, of which four of them (miRNAs 223-3p, miR 210-3p, miR100-5p and miR-221 3p) could be proposed as a signature for the diagnosis of PDAC with a sensitivity and specificity of 0.74 and 0.82 respectively for patients residing in the Mexican Republic. The 56 target mRNA of these 9 miRNAs were found to be mainly enriched in fatty acid oxidation, glucose homeostasis, amino acid transport organonitrogen compound catabolism. Finally, four of the target mRNA may serve as a prognostic marker for PDAC in tissue samples.
Project description:Pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma is aggressive disease with a dismal five-year survival of 5%. Gene expression profiling has been instrumental for subtype classification in cancer, highlighting fundamental differences in tumors at the molecular level. Over the last years, multiple genomics studies have led to the classification of PDAC into two major subtypes: classical and basal-type. The classical subtype expresses higher levels of endodermal lineage specifiers, including HNF4A, GATA6, FOXA2, FOXA3 than the basal-type. The basal-type confers a worse prognosis, raising the possibility that loss of these lineage specifiers might enhance the malignant potential of PDAC. We found that the lineage specifier HNF4a plays a key role in maintaining a transcriptional network that characterizes the classical subtype, restraining growth in different PDAC models. Additionally, we demonstrated that HNF4a controls PDAC cell identity and proliferation, and represses the expression of SIX family members, two mesodermal lineage specifiers highly expressed in basal-type.