Indiana University Melvin and Bren Simon Comprehensive Cancer Center researchers have mapped pancreatic cancer tumor ecosystems using tissue from both the primary tumor, which is where cancer first starts to grow in the body, and metastatic disease, or when cancer cells spread to different parts of the body beyond the primary tumor. The study, recently published in Nature Genetics , uncovers notable differences between primary and metastatic pancreatic cancer, which could lead to new treatment strategies for the often-deadly disease. Study senior author Ashiq Masood, MD, associate professor of medicine at the IU School of Medicine, used spatial transcriptomic, a method to study a region of cells and their interactions, to uncover these ecosystems of pancreatic cancer.
"In about 85% of pancreatic cancer cases, surgery is not an option because it's either too advanced or has spread to other organs such as the liver," said Masood, a researcher at the cancer center. "For that reason, it's been very difficult to get enough tumor tissue to do sequencing of both the primary and metastatic tumors." IU and its health care partner Indiana University Health have one of the highest-volume pancreatic cancer programs in the country, with surgeons performing more pancreatic cancer surgeries than any other team in the nation.
This makes IU uniquely positioned to yield diverse tumor samples that are stored in a tissue bank for cancer research . While pancreatic cancer accounts for fewer than .