Abstract
Research led by the Dartmouth Geisel School of Medicine shows that epigenetic screening can predict pancreatic cancer prognosis and also whether tumors are likely to respond to therapy or not.
Pancreatic cancer has a poor prognosis, only 25% of people survive for one year after diagnosis. The most common type of pancreatic cancer is pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (90% cases) and treatment options are fairly limited.
In this study, Steven Leach, a professor at Dartmouth Geisel, and colleagues, tested genome-wide chromatin accessibility patterns for pancreatic tumors by creating an assay for transposase-accessible chromatin sequencing (ATAC-seq).
They carried out the assay using tumor cells extracted from 54 human pancreatic tumors before the patients began treatment with chemotherapy.
As described in the journal Nature Communications, the researchers found an epigenetic signature of 1092 different markers on the chromatin that differed between patients who subsequently had disease free survival of less than one year compared with those who were disease-free for longer.
Of these 1092 markers, they discovered that 723 are silenced in chemo-resistant tumors and are predictive of treatment response.
