Discovery of novel candidate oncogenes in pancreatic carcinoma using high-throughput microarrays

Pancreatic cancer is one of the most aggressive tumors in mankind. Its aggressiveness is only due to the biological progressive characteristics but also the difficulty for clinical early detection which urges us to find diagnostic tools for early diagnosis. Biomarkers are a developing tool used to measure molecules such as proteins, DNA, or RNAs in blood samples or suspected tumor tissues. The molecular dysregulation is believed to play major roles in tumorigenesis or a result after the tumor formation and can be used as a biomarker for tumor detection.

In this paper, we studied the gene expression profiles using tissues from pancreatic cancer patients.

We observed dysregulation of gene expression profiles using high-throughput sequencing technique and verified three-gene upregulation, REG4, CDH3 and S100P both in pancreatic cell lines and carcinoma tissues by RT-PCR and Northern Blot. A detailed description of the genes involved is listed within this article.

We believe that by unraveling the gene dysregulation profiles in pancreatic tumor tissues can we achieve an early and precise diagnosis of pancreatic cancer. Moreover, these newly found genes, due to their functions involved in cell migration and mitosis, may play major roles in tumorigensis.