Pancreatic cancer has an estimated survival rate of only 5-6% (Siegel et al. 2015). The difficulty in early detection methods compounded by clinical trial failures precipitates the need for innovative approaches to accelerate pancreatic cancer drug development. Cell lines are often used for preclinical compound screening because of their ease of culture, availability, and literature prevalence. However, these criteria may not select optimal model tumors of pancreatic cancer patients due to genomic differences. The proposed project is to analyze pancreatic cancer cell lines to compare how genetically, genomically, and transcriptomically similar they are to tumors from pancreatic cancer patients with the final goal of predicting optimal cell lines from in vitro pancreatic cancer modelling and compound testing to accelerate pre-clinical testing.
