Pancreatic Cancer Database

Abstract

Pancreatic cancer is the fourth leading cause of cancer-related death in the world. The etiology of pancreatic cancer is heterogeneous with a wide range of alterations that have already been reported at the level of the genome, transcriptome, and proteome. The past decade has witnessed a large number of experimental studies using high-throughput technology platforms to identify genes whose expression at the transcript or protein levels is altered in pancreatic cancer. Based on expression studies, a number of molecules have also been proposed as potential biomarkers for diagnosis and prognosis of this deadly cancer. Currently, there are no repositories which provide an integrative view of multiple Omics data sets from published research on pancreatic cancer. Here, we describe the development of a web-based resource, Pancreatic Cancer Database (http://www.pancreaticcancerdatabase.org), as a unified platform for pancreatic cancer research. PCD contains manually curated information pertaining to quantitative alterations in miRNA, mRNA, and proteins obtained from small-scale as well as high-throughput studies of pancreatic cancer tissues and cell lines. We believe that PCD will serve as an integrative platform for scientific community involved in pancreatic cancer research.

Keywords: :

• biomarker
• body fluids
• chronic pancreatitis
• secreted

Disclosure of Potential Conflicts of Interest

No potential conflicts of interest were disclosed.

Funding

Pancreatic Cancer Database was funded by the Sol Goldman Pancreatic Cancer Research Center at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore, MD USA.

Acknowledgments

We thank Department of Biotechnology, Government of India for Research Support to Institute of Bioinformatics. Aneesha Radhakrishnan is a recipient of Senior Research Fellowship from Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), Government of India. We acknowledge Praveen Kumar, Renu Goel and Sandhya Rani, Institute of Bioinformatics, Bangalore, India for their curation support and database development. We also thank Adwait Sodani, Aniruddha Sahu, Ankit Chawla, Ankit Kumar, Mahashweta Dash, and Satish Kumar from Armed Forces Medical College (AFMC), Pune, India, for critical reading of the manuscript.