Epigenetics and pancreatic cancer: Pathophysiology and novel treatment aspects

摘要: An improvement in pancreatic cancer treatment represents an urgent medical goal. Late diagnosis and high intrinsic resistance to conventional chemotherapy has led a dismal overall prognosis that remained unchanged during the past decades. Increasing knowledge about molecular pathogenesis of disease shown genetic alterations, such as mutations K-ras, especially epigenetic dysregulation tumor-associated genes, silencing tumor suppressor p16(ink4a), are hallmarks cancer. Here, we describe genes commonly affected by via DNA methylation, histone acetylation or miRNA (microRNA) expression, review implications on biology epithelial-mesenchymal transition, morphological pattern formation, stem cell regulation carcinogenesis from PanIN (pancreatic intraepithelial lesions) invasive development. Epigenetic drugs, methyltransferases deactylase inhibitors, have promising preclinical results currently early phases clinical Combinations drugs with established cytotoxic targeted therapies approaches improve poor response survival rate patients.