Changes in Biomarkers From Blood Over Time in Patients With Pancreatic Adenocarcinoma

Pancreatic adenocarcinoma (PDAC) is the fourth leading cause of cancer mortality in the United States. The high mortality for these tumors is primarily attributed to the late stage in which most patients are diagnosed, leading to a dismal 5-year survival of 6% for all stages of PDAC. Surgical resection offers the best chance for survival, but most patients only present with symptoms after the tumor has metastasized, and as a result are not operative candidates. This creates a need to both identify patients at an earlier stage while their cancer is still resectable, and predict the aggressiveness of the disease in order to better target treatment. In addition, even patients who receive curative surgery are at a high risk of developing recurrence of disease. Thus, there is also a need to detect recurrence early so appropriate treatment can be provided. As several adjuvant chemotherapeutic regimens are now available, it will be important to identify as soon as possible that the cancer has become refractory to a given therapy. This will allow one to progress to second or third line therapy more quickly while the tumor burden is smaller. This purpose of this study is to identify biomarkers in the blood of patients with PDAC and determine how they can change over time in relation to treatment to assess for any correlation with patient outcomes, response to treatment, recurrence of disease and overall survival. This study will be limited to patients who present to the Johns Hopkins Hospital between January 1, 2015 and December 31, 2018 with PDAC. Blood will be drawn from all consenting patients at the time of initial diagnosis and after treatment. Patients will undergo treatment for their cancer based on personal preference, standard guidelines and discussion with medical, radiation, and surgical oncologists. Patients who undergo surgical resection will also have an additional blood sample collected after resection, and patients who undergo chemotherapy and/or radiation wi