Integrated transcriptomic and in silico drug screening identifies potential stroma-targeting therapeutics in pancreatic cancer

This study identifies a gene panel that can distinguish two stromal subgroups of resected pancreatic cancers which have different microenvironment features and prognosis, and can be targeted by different therapeutic approaches. In-silico and in-vitro analysis indicates that our proposed signature could be further investigated as a predictor of response of immunomodulatory agents, including anti CD40 therapeutics A custom Nanostring-panel including probes for 198 genes associated to stromal activation was run in the tumour tissue of fully clinically-annotated human resected PDACs (N=48).