Studying Biomarkers in Patients With Pancreatic Cancer

Developing Biomarkers in Pancreatic Cancer

RATIONALE: Studying samples of tissue in the laboratory from patients with cancer may help doctors identify and learn more about biomarkers related to cancer. It may also help doctors predict how patients will respond to treatment.

PURPOSE: This research study is studying biomarkers in patients with pancreatic cancer.

OBJECTIVES:

• To determine whether the cellular localization of BRCA1 can predict how patients with pancreatic cancer will respond to cytotoxic agents (e.g., fluorouracil or gemcitabine hydrochloride) or radiotherapy.
• To identify pre-treatment markers that can be used to correlate with clinical outcomes of survival and recurrence.
• To determine if a method of extracting and identifying secreted cytokines and growth factors from biopsy tissue can now be applied to the pancreatic cancer population.

OUTLINE: Tissue samples from biopsies performed during pancreatectomy are collected from the Vanderbilt Ingram Cancer Center Human Tissue Acquisition Core for laboratory biomarker studies. Proteins secreted by cancer cells and/or cancer-associated cells are studied by extracting and identifying secreted cytokines and growth factors from biopsy tissue. The integrity of the DNA repair pathway in pancreatic cancer is analyzed by Rad51 and phosphorylated DNA-PK foci formation. Markers are correlated with clinical outcome.

Patients are followed for recurrence, relapse, and death from disease.

Inclusion criteria

• Any subject with excess tissue collected at time of routine surgery for pancreatic cancer is eligible.
• All subjects participating in this protocol will be followed for recurrence, relapse and death from disease