Analysis of donor pancreata defines the transcriptomic signature and microenvironment of early neoplastic pancreatic lesions.

The adult healthy human pancreas has been poorly studied given lack of indication to obtain tissue from the pancreas in the absence of disease and rapid postmortem degradation. We obtained pancreata from brain dead donors thus avoiding any warm ischemia time. We found that neoplastic lesions occur frequently in healthy organs, in donors as young as in their 3rd decade of life. Using the 10X Genomics Platform, we performed single cell RNA sequencing on 7 donor pancreata, 6 of which we separately sequenced tissue from the pancreas head and tail, for a total of 11 sequencing runs. Of note, because one of our runs (containing sequencing from pancreas head and tail) did not pass qc, our final analysis in our study utilized 6 donor pancreata, 5 of which contained pancreas head and tail... (for more see dbGaP study page.)