Functional, Personalised and Integrated Profiling of Biopsied Pancreatic Tumours (CancerProfile by FNB)

Pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) has the poorest prognosis of all digestive cancers due to lack of early diagnosis and limited response to treatment. Patient-derived organoid technology has become a mainstay of precision oncology, enabling personalised functional characterisation of tumours (e.g. treatment evaluation and drug screening). Initial research carried out as part of the Cancer Profile project has produced the first organoids from resected PDAC parts.

Only 15-20% of patients can benefit from surgical resection, which remains the only curative treatment. In contrast, most patients with PDAC undergo diagnostic fine-needle biopsies (FNB) using an echo-endoscopic procedure (EUS). The next step is therefore the reliable generation of organoids from limited quantities of biopsy material obtained by 'EUS-FNB'.

The aim of the study presented here is to validate these organoids on the basis of the following characteristics: (i) morphological and proliferative characteristics, (ii) recapitulation of the genetic characteristics of the original tumour, (iii) expression of tumour markers.