Transcriptional variations in the wider peritumoral tissue environment of pancreatic cancer

Andrea S. Bauer, Petr V. Nazarov (Main author), Nathalia A. Giese, Stefania Beghelli, Anette Heller, William Greenhalf, Eithne Costello, Arnaud Muller, Melanie Bier, Oliver Strobel, Thilo Hackert, Laurent Vallar, Aldo Scarpa, Markus W. Büchler, John P. Neoptolemos, Stephanie Kreis, Jörg D. Hoheisel*

*Corresponding author for this work

    Research output: Contribution to journalArticleResearchpeer-review

    12 Citations (Scopus)

    Abstract

    Transcriptional profiling was performed on 452 RNA preparations isolated from various types of pancreatic tissue from tumour patients and healthy donors, with a particular focus on peritumoral samples. Pancreatic ductal adenocarcinomas (PDAC) and cystic tumours were most different in these non-tumorous tissues surrounding them, whereas the actual tumours exhibited rather similar transcript patterns. The environment of cystic tumours was transcriptionally nearly identical to normal pancreas tissue. In contrast, the tissue around PDAC behaved a lot like the tumour, indicating some kind of field defect, while showing far less molecular resemblance to both chronic pancreatitis and healthy tissue. This suggests that the major pathogenic difference between cystic and ductal tumours may be due to their cellular environment rather than the few variations between the tumours. Lack of correlation between DNA methylation and transcript levels makes it unlikely that the observed field defect in the peritumoral tissue of PDAC is controlled to a large extent by such epigenetic regulation. Functionally, a strikingly large number of autophagy-related transcripts was changed in both PDAC and its peritumoral tissue, but not in other pancreatic tumours. A transcription signature of 15 autophagy-related genes was established that permits a prognosis of survival with high accuracy and indicates the role of autophagy in tumour biology.

    Original languageEnglish
    Pages (from-to)1010-1021
    Number of pages12
    JournalInternational Journal of Cancer
    Volume142
    Issue number5
    DOIs
    Publication statusPublished - 1 Mar 2018

    Keywords

    • disease prognosis
    • pancreatic cancer
    • peritumoral tissue
    • survival
    • transcript variations

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