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.
Highlights
Across sources, the top identified risk factors for pancreatic cancer include: Smoking, obesity, age, recent onset diabetes mellitus, recent pancreatitis, hereditary pancreatitis and hereditary pancreatic cancer. These risk factors are only present in about 50–60% of pancreatic cancer cases, with known genetic alterations only accounting for about 5–10% [1,2,3,4]
chromatin remodeling (CR) can be initiated by various types of histones or through an ATP-dependent mobilization of nucleosomes; the latter is termed as nucleosome remodeling (NR)
epigenome-wide association studies (EWAS) studies have mostly focused on assessing the relationship between Pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) diagnosis or prognosis with methylation or ncRNA markers across the genome
Summary
Across sources, the top identified risk factors for pancreatic cancer include: Smoking, obesity, age, recent onset diabetes mellitus, recent pancreatitis, hereditary pancreatitis and hereditary pancreatic cancer. These risk factors are only present in about 50–60% of pancreatic cancer cases, with known genetic alterations only accounting for about 5–10% [1,2,3,4]. Epigenetic changes are heritable modifications that are made to the DNA chemistry or chromatin structures, influencing gene expression without altering the DNA sequence [9]. Epigenetic alterations to oncogenes and tumor suppressor genes affect tumor progression and are associated with PDAC patient survival post-diagnosis [10]. We will describe the different epigenetic processes and move to focus on epigenome-wide technologies and epigenome-wide association studies (EWAS) that have investigated epigenetic markers associated with either the diagnosis or prognosis of pancreatic cancer
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