Refining pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma molecular subtype and precision therapeutics with single-nucleus RNA-seq

Excerpt

Pancreatic cancer is predicted to become the second leading cause of cancer-related deaths in the USA by 2030 with a 5-year survival rate of only 9% [1, 2]. Pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) is the most common form of pancreatic malignancy and remains a treatment-refractory disease. So far, apart from surgical resection, conventional chemotherapies, radiotherapies, few therapeutic strategies, adjuvant or neoadjuvant, are available for improved PDAC patient benefit. In recent years, more research efforts have been devoted to developing targeted therapeutics via discovery of novel molecular vulnerabilities and molecular subtyping of various diseases. For PDAC, despite many attempts to refine its molecular taxonomy over the years, the current molecular subtyping still does not efficiently inform novel molecular vulnerabilities for the development of targeted therapies. Thus, fine-tuning the resolution of PDAC molecular subtyping has become a pivotal need. …