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New research from the University of Cincinnati Cancer Center found biological differences in pancreatic cancer tumors and immune environments, opening the possibility for more personalized treatments for different populations.

Led by Nina Steele, Ph.D., assistant professor in UC's College of Medicine, in collaboration with Howard Crawford, Ph.D., scientific director of the Henry Ford + Michigan State University Pancreatic Cancer Center, the research was recently published in the journal Cancer Research.

Incidence and survival rates of pancreatic cancer vary between different populations of Americans, but sufficient data did not previously exist to determine specific genomic differences between populations.

"We didn't have an accurate reflection of all of the patients impacted by the disease reflected in the data," said Steele, who is also a Cancer Center member. "There had never been a large-scale multiomic effort looking at tens of thousands of biological markers across a diverse cohort of pancreatic cancer patients."

Steele and her colleagues at Henry Ford Health (where she started the project) and UC mapped out the genomic information of a representative sample of the American population diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.

Pancreatic cancer is 20% more likely to develop in Black African Americans (BAA), and the team found the cancer cells of BAA and non-African Americans (NAA) had different molecular signatures.

"The cancer cells make unique RNAs and proteins, so that could be relevant to how individual patients from different groups could respond to targeted therapies like RAS inhibitors ," Steele said.

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