Inventors:
Bert Vogelstein - Baltimore MD, US
Kenneth W. Kinzler - Baltimore MD, US
D. Williams Parsons - Ellicott City MD, US
Sian Jones - Baltimore MD, US
Xiaosong Zhang - Baltimore MD, US
Jimmy Cheng-Ho Lin - Baltimore MD, US
Rebecca J. Leary - Baltimore MD, US
Philipp Angenendt - Hamburg, DE
Nickolas Papadopoulos - Towson MD, US
Victor Velculescu - Dayton MD, US
Giovanni Parmigiani - Brookline MA, US
Rachel Karchin - Towson MD, US
Scott Kern - Hunt Valley MD, US
Ralph Hruban - Baltimore MD, US
James R. Eshleman - Lutherville MD, US
Michael Goggins - Baltimore MD, US
Alison Klein - Baltimore MD, US
Assignee:
THE JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY - Baltimore MD
International Classification:
C12Q 1/68, C40B 20/00, C07H 21/04
US Classification:
506 2, 435 611, 536 2431, 536 2433
Abstract:
There are currently few therapeutic options for patients with pancreatic cancers and new insights into the pathogenesis of this lethal disease are urgently needed. To this end, we performed a comprehensive analysis of the genes altered in 24 pancreatic tumors. First, we determined the sequences of 23,781 transcripts, representing 20,583 protein-encoding genes, in DNA from these tumors. Second, we searched for homozygous deletions and amplifications using microarrays querying ˜one million single nucleotide polymorphisms in each sample. Third, we analyzed the transcriptomes of the same samples using SAGE and next-generation sequencing-by-synthesis technologies. We found that pancreatic cancers contain an average of 63 genetic alterations, of which 49 are point mutations, 8 are homozygous deletions, and 6 are amplifications. Further analyses revealed a core set of 12 regulatory processes or pathways that were each genetically altered in 70% to 100% of the samples. The data suggest that dysregulation of this core set of pathways is responsible for the major features of pancreatic tumorigenesis.