Expression profiling of pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma

Pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) has the worst prognosis of all common cancers, but divergent outcomes are apparent between patients. To delineate the intertumor heterogeneity that contributes to this, we aimed to identify clinically distinct gene expression-based subgroups. From a cohort of 345 resected pancreatic cancer cases, 90 samples with confirmed diagnosis of PDAC and sufficient tumor content were available for gene expression analysis by RNA sequencing. Unsupervised classification was applied, and a classifier was constructed. Species-specific transcript analysis on matching patient-derived xenografts (PDX, N=14) allowed construction of tumor- and stroma-specific classifiers for use on PDX models and cell lines.胰腺导管腺癌（PDAC）是所有常见恶性肿瘤中预后最差的癌种，然而不同患者的临床结局差异显著。为阐明驱动该现象的肿瘤间异质性，本研究旨在鉴定基于基因表达谱的临床特异性亚型。本研究从345例经手术切除的胰腺癌病例队列中，筛选出90例经病理学确诊为PDAC且肿瘤组织占比充足的样本，用于RNA测序开展基因表达分析。研究采用无监督分类方法进行分析，并构建了分类器。对匹配的患者来源异种移植瘤（PDX，N=14）进行物种特异性转录本分析，成功构建了针对肿瘤组织与基质组织的特异性分类器，可应用于PDX模型及细胞系的相关研究。