Efforts to model pancreatic cancer in mice have focused on mimicking genetic changes found in the human disease, particularly the activating KRAS mutations that occur in pancreatic tumors and their putative precursors, pancreatic intraepithelial neoplasia (PanIN).
Although the rate of p53 mutations in pancreatic tumours is of the same order as in other adenocarcinomas (> or = 50%), an antibody response was found in only 5/78 (6.4%) sera from patients with pancreatic cancer.
The combination of mutant KRAS with a single inactivating TP53, SMAD4 or CDKN2A mutation in genetically engineered mouse models (GEMMs) showed that these mutations exert different synergistic effects in PC.
K-ras gene mutations at codon 12 were detected in the sera of 14 of 20 patients with pancreatic carcinoma and in none of the six patients with chronic pancreatitis, or in the five healthy controls.
Overexpression of Gli1, MDM2 and mutant p53 contributes to the development and progression of PC, and plays an important role in predicting PC patients' prognosis.
The sensitivity, specificity, positive and negative predictive values of serum serum KRAS2 mutations for the diagnosis of pancreatic cancer were 47, 87, 85 and 52%, respectively.
In subgroup analyses, KRAS mutation in pancreatic cancer, colorectal cancer, non-small cell lung cancer and ovarian epithelial cancer had HRs of 2.81 (95% CI 1.83-4.30, P<0.01), 1.67 (95% CI 1.25-2.42, P<0.01), 1.64 (95% CI 1.13-2.39, P = 0.01) and 2.17 (95% 1.12-4.21, p = 0.02) for OS, respectively.
In this report, using the deleted in pancreatic cancer locus 4 (DPC4) gene in pancreatic cancer as an example, we show the feasibility of a novel screening strategy, which we have named Pharmacological Synthetic Lethal Screening, for the identification of agents that selectively target cancer cells with loss-of-function mutations.
Remarkably, in 3D spheroid cancer cell cultures, some triple action compounds showed an antitumor potency up to 50-fold higher than cisplatin against a KRAS mutated pancreatic cancer cell line (PSN-1 cells).
The value of K-ras gene mutation for the detection of early pancreatic cancer and differentiation pancreatic cancer from chronic pancreatitis remains uncertain in clinical practice.
Hyperinsulinemia is a risk factor for pancreatic cancer, but the function of insulin in carcinogenesis is unclear, so this study aimed to elucidate the carcinogenic effects of insulin and the synergistic effect with the KRAS mutation in the early stage of pancreatic cancer.
KRAS mutation is often present in many hard-to-treat tumors such as colon and pancreatic cancer and it is tightly linked to serious alterations in the normal cell metabolism and clinical resistance to chemotherapy.In 1931, the winner of the Nobel Prize in Medicine, Otto Warburg, stated that cancer was primarily caused by altered metabolism interfering with energy processing in the normal cell.
A panel of human carcinomas of the exocrine pancreas orthotopically implanted and perpetuated in nude mice and pancreatic cancer cell lines were studied. p15 gene alterations, mainly homozygous deletions that involved exons 1 and/or 2, were found in the 62.5% (5 of 8) of pancreatic xenografts whereas Smad4 gene aberrations were found in one of eight xenografts and in two of seven cell lines.