UC researcher identifies biological differences in pancreatic cancer

The University of Cincinnati Cancer Center's Nina Steele joined Spectrum News to discuss her recent research that found differences in pancreatic cancer tumors and immune environments, opening the possibility for more personalized treatments.

The research was recently published in the journal Cancer Research.

“We didn’t have an accurate reflection of all of the patients impacted by the disease reflected in the data,” Steele, PhD, assistant professor in UC’s College of Medicine, told Spectrum News. “There had never been a large-scale multiomic effort looking at tens of thousands of biological markers across a diverse cohort of pancreatic cancer patients.”

Steele and her colleagues at Henry Ford Health (where she started the project) and UC mapped out the genomic information of a representative sample of the American population diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.

Pancreatic cancer is 20% more likely to develop in Black African Americans (BAA), and the team found the cancer cells of BAA and Non-African Americans (NAA) had different molecular signatures.

“The markers upregulated in Black patients likely represent a type of cells typically associated with drug resistance, so this biological difference could play a role in outcomes," Steele said.

Watch or read the Spectrum News segment.

Read more about the research.

Featured photo at top of pancreatic cancer cell courtesy of the National Cancer Institute/Unsplash.