Abstract
To improve the prognosis of patients with pancreatic cancer, it is necessary to establish diagnostic methods for the detection of early pancreatic cancer. Also, it is often difficult to distinguish pancreatic cancer from mass-forming pancreatitis or other pancreatic diseases. We have been investigating the changes in mRNA expression of pancreatic cancer-related molecules during pancreatic carcinogenesis to improve the diagnostic ability for pancreatic cancer. First, we performed laser-microdissection to isolate the PanIN and IPMN cells as well as the invasive ductal carcinoma cells and normal ductal cells and measured the expression of S100 and MUC family genes using quantitative real-time RT-PCR. Furthermore, we analyzed the expression of these genes in pancreatic juice and examined its clinical implication. Here, we summarize our results and discuss about the future of pancreatic cancer diagnosis.
