Human multiethnic radiogenomics reveals low-abundancy microRNA signature in plasma-derived extracellular vesicles for early diagnosis and molecular subtyping of pancreatic cancer

Pancreatic cancer (PC) is a highly lethal malignancy, and its early diagnosis remains a clinical challenge. Extracellular vesicles (EVs) derived from patient plasma contain diverse RNA species that may serve as minimally invasive biomarkers. In this study, we performed RNA sequencing (RNA-seq) on EVs isolated from plasma samples of 85 individuals, including 65 patients with pancreatic cancer and 20 patients with benign pancreatic diseases. The benign group consisted of 10 intraductal papillary mucinous neoplasms (IPMN) and 10 chronic pancreatitis (CP) cases. Our aim was to identify differentially expressed RNA signatures in plasma-derived EVs that can distinguish pancreatic cancer from benign conditions. This dataset provides a valuable resource for biomarker discovery in liquid biopsy-based diagnosis of pancreatic cancer. A total of 85 plasma EV samples were analyzed using RNA-sequencing (RNA-seq), including 65 samples from patients with pancreatic cancer (PC) and 20 samples from patients with benign pancreatic conditions. Among the 20 benign cases, 10 were intraductal papillary mucinous neoplasms (IPMN) and 10 were chronic pancreatitis (CP).