BioCentury
ARTICLE | Targets & Mechanisms

Branching out in pancreatic cancer

October 23, 2014 7:00 AM UTC

Predicting pancreatic cancer has been a major problem in the disease, which is normally too advanced for effective treatment by the time it is diagnosed. Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute have identified a prediagnostic signature of branched-chain amino acids that could help improve risk prediction up to five years before the disease appears, but developing a viable biomarker panel will require identification of the tumor factors that trigger the change.1

The findings were based on four large-scale, prospective public health cohorts that each included 22,000-122,000 subjects and focused on pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma-the major form of pancreatic neoplasms...