Pancreatic cancer biomarkers list created

BALTIMORE, April 7 (UPI) -- A Johns Hopkins University scientist has created a compendium of 50,000 possible pancreatic cancer biomarkers and says he's asked his colleagues to study it.

Associate Professor Dr. Akhilesh Pandey, founder and director of the Institute of Bioinformatics in Bangalore, India, said with limited resources available for the testing needed to be considered a bona fide biomarker of clinical value, it's important to take stock of the big picture and come up with strategies.

Pandey and his team amassed 2,516 potential biomarkers of pancreatic cancer. More than 200 genes are shortlisted because they were reported as overexpressed in four or more published studies. That, the scientists said, means the proteins they make are in higher abundance in people with pancreatic cancer than in people without the disease. That qualifies them for the further studies needed to validate them as sensitive and specific biomarkers.

Pandey says he was motivated by the fact that even leading cancer investigators had no real idea about how many candidate biomarkers for pancreatic cancer had been identified.

"Curation and databases are not very sexy concepts," said Pandey. "But we can't keep doing the exciting new discovery stuff and never take the time to catalog our results and share them."

The research appears in the journal PLoS Medicine.