A Prospective Translational Tissue Collection Study in Early and Advanced Pancreatic Ductal Adenocarcinoma and Pancreatic Neuroendocrine Tumours to Enable Further Disease Characterisation and the Development of Potential Predictive and Prognostic Biomarkers

There are several types of early pre-cancerous lesions found in the pancreas which have the potential to develop into pancreatic cancer. Although different patients' pancreatic cancers or pre-cancerous pancreatic lesions have many similarities we believe that subtle differences can affect how they behave and therefore influence individual patient outcomes. Many factors may account for the differences seen in pancreatic lesion behaviour, for example molecular and genetic differences (the DNA and RNA present which control how a cell grows and divides), differences in how the immune system responds to the lesion, differences in the environment immediately around the lesion in the pancreas, known as the tumour microenvironment and differences in the micro-organisms which colonize a particular patient, known as their microbiota . This project studies the molecular makeup of pancreatic lesions and their microenvironment at various stages (from pre-cancerous lesions all the way through to more advanced disease) to see if we can use this information to divide patients into different groups whose lesions may behave in similar ways. We will be trying to find out if there are molecular reasons why some patients respond to particular treatments when others do not, why some patients experience more toxicity with particular treatments and why some patients' disease behaves particularly aggressively when other patients' disease does not. We will also be investigating the particular micro-organisms colonizing individual patients to see if these impact a patient's outcome. Understanding what makes one person's pancreatic lesion behave differently to another's could lead to better treatment, where a personalized therapeutic strategy could be applied for every single patient.