Drug Discovery in Pancreatic Cancer: Models and Techniques

Pancreatic cancer is the fourth leading cause of cancer death in the United States. Every year, about 33,700 people in the United States will be diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and over 32,000 patients will die from the disease. The median survival of patients with advanced pancreatic cancer is about 6-months. This dismal picture of pancreatic cancer is mainly due to the lack of early diagnosis and effective treatment for patients with advanced disease. To increase the survival rate of pancreatic cancer patients, better tumor markers for diagnosis and new molecular targets for drug development are desperately needed. A lot of effort has been made in searching for pancreatic cancer-causing genes or genes associated with progression of malignant behavior in pancreatic cancer. As a result, alterations in the expression of several cancer-related genes have been identified in pancreatic tumors. The identification and characterization of these cancer-related genes have significantly increased our understanding of pancreatic cancer development, but unfortunately the treatment of pancreatic cancer has not advanced as much in the past 20 years. Over the past decade, tremendous advances have been made in the field of cancer drug discovery, particularly, in the area of molecular and genetic models and technologies. Many of those advanced models and technologies have been applied to the drug discovery processes for pancreatic cancer. In this book, a team of experts will describe the latest development in the application of these models and technologies in pancreatic cancer. The authors include basic researchers as well as clinicians who work in the front-line of the war against pancreatic cancer and have the first-hand experience on these cutting-edge tools and techniques. The book can be divided into two general areas: 1) model systems and 2) genomics and proteomics tools. In recent years there have been a lot of advances in the model syste