Abstract
Several challenges present themselves when discussing current approaches to the prevention or treatment of pancreatic cancer. Up to 45% of the risk of pancreatic cancer is attributed to unknown causes, making effective prevention programs difficult to design. The most common type of pancreatic cancer, pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC), is generally diagnosed at a late stage, leading to a poor prognosis and 5-year survival estimate. PDAC tumors are heterogeneous, leading to many identified cell subtypes within one patient’s primary tumor. This explains why there is a high frequency of tumors that are resistant to standard treatments, leading to high relapse rates. This review will discuss how epigenetic technologies and epigenome-wide association studies have been used to address some of these challenges and the future promises these approaches hold.
Original language | English (US) |
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Article number | 5 |
Journal | Epigenomes |
Volume | 3 |
Issue number | 1 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Mar 2019 |
Externally published | Yes |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:Funding: Financial support was provided by NDSU COBRE Center for Diagnostic and Therapeutic Strategies in Pancreatic Cancer through a NIH grant (number [P20GM109024]).
Publisher Copyright:
© 2019 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.
Keywords
- DNA
- Epigenetics
- Epigenomes
- Expression
- Histones
- Methylation
- Pancreatic cancer
- RNA