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Updated: Oct 23, 2025
Pancreatic Tissue Dissection to Isolate Viable Single Cells
Published on: May 26, 2023
Elucidation of Tumor-Stromal Heterogeneity and the Ligand-Receptor Interactome by Single-Cell Transcriptomics in
Jaewon J Lee1,2,3, Vincent Bernard1,2, Alexander Semaan1,2
1Sheikh Ahmed Center for Pancreatic Cancer Research, The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, Texas.
Purpose:
Precision medicine approaches in pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) are imperative for improving disease outcomes. With molecular subtypes of PDAC gaining relevance in the context of therapeutic stratification, the ability to characterize heterogeneity of cancer-specific gene expression patterns is of great interest. In addition, understanding patterns of immune evasion within PDAC is of importance as novel immunotherapeutic strategies are developed.
Experimental Design:
Single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) is readily applicable to limited biopsies from human primary and metastatic PDAC and identifies most cancers as being an admixture of previously described epithelial transcriptomic subtypes.
Results:
Integrative analyses of our data provide an in-depth characterization of the heterogeneity within the tumor microenvironment, including cancer-associated fibroblast subclasses, and predicts for a multitude of ligand-receptor interactions, revealing potential targets for immunotherapy approaches.
Conclusions:
Our analysis demonstrates that the use of de novo biopsies from patients with PDAC paired with scRNA-seq may facilitate therapeutic prediction from limited biopsy samples.
