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1 Departments of Pathology and Oncology, Sol Goldman Pancreatic Cancer Research Center, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore, Maryland; Departments of 2 Medicine and Gastroenterology Division and 3 Medicine and Cancer Biology, Abramson Family Cancer Research Institute, Abramson Cancer Center at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; 4 Department of Medicine, University of Washington School of Medicine, Seattle, Washington; 5 Division of Medical Oncology, University of California at San Francisco Comprehensive Cancer Center, San Francisco, California; 6 Cell and Developmental Biology Department, Vanderbilt Developmental Biology Program, Nashville, Tennessee
Requests for reprints: David A. Tuveson, Department of Medicine/Heme-Onc, University of Pennsylvania, 512 BRB II/III, 421 Curie Boulevard, Philadelphia, PA 19104-6160. Phone: 215-746-5560; Fax: 215-573-2486; E-mail: tuvesond{at}mail.med.upenn.edu.
| Abstract |
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| Pancreatic Cancer: Introduction and Rationale to Develop Animal Models |
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| Overview of Pancreatic Cancer Biology and Therapy |
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Surgical resection remains the predominant approach for operable PDA, and Jeff Drebin (University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA) suggested that neoadjuvant approaches should be pursued to increase resectability and provide tissue for the pharmacodynamic assessment of investigational agents. Although the role of radiation therapy is controversial in the adjuvant and palliative setting for PDA patients, Stephen Hahn (University of Pennsylvania) countered that carefully controlled studies show benefit. Furthermore, he presented data that radiation therapy could act synergistically with farnesyl transferase inhibitors in preclinical and clinical trials (6). James Abbruzzese (MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, TX) reported little progress toward improving upon the limited efficacy of gemcitabine in advanced pancreatic cancer, and he urged the investigation of rationally targeted agents. However, he cautioned that ex vivo activity does not translate to in vivo efficacy using the example of paradoxical disease progression in a clinical trial of PDA patients treated with the rapamycin derivative CCI-779.7 An exciting preclinical finding presented by Scott Kern (Johns Hopkins University) was the correlation between germ line mutations in Fanconi anemia genes, such as the BRCA2 gene, and an increased sensitivity to the alkylating agent mitomycin C (7). According to Gloria Petersen (Mayo Clinic), BRCA2 gene mutations account for as much as 17% of the familial aggregation of PDA (8); thus, this finding could be clinically relevant to a sizable number of patients and should be rigorously evaluated in clinical trials.
| Classification and Further Development of GEMs of Exocrine Pancreatic Cancer |
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A breakout group led by Chris Wright (Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN), Ray MacDonald (University of Texas Southwestern, Dallas, TX), Charles Murtaugh (University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT), and Gloria Su (Columbia University, New York, NY) discussed the creation of improved GEMs for pancreatic cancer. The committee strongly supported cross-disciplinary collaborations between developmental biologists and cancer geneticists to address pertinent scientific issues and to organize their respective efforts in a mutually beneficial fashion. The characterization of the cell lineages responsible for normal and neoplastic ductal differentiation was viewed as a top priority. Suggested approaches included the identification of ductal-specific markers to enable the engineering of Tamoxifen-inducible Cre recombinase alleles for lineage-tracing studies within specific developmental contexts, and the rigorous investigation of centroacinar cells as candidate exocrine stem cells. The development of models of cystic pancreatic neoplasms, including intraductal papillary mucinous neoplasms, was also discussed as an unmet need in the field. The creation of a pancreatic cancer consortium community that integrates pancreatic developmental biologists and cancer geneticists was proposed as a means to increase recognition and funding for this area. Furthermore, the pancreatic cancer consortium community would establish committees to document and advertise available reagents and protocols, create a GEM tissue bank, and organize educational efforts, such as regular meetings and joint training fellowships. In particular, a specific and often updated website as a focus point for information sharing was proposed.
| Therapeutic Applications of Exocrine Pancreatic Cancer GEMs |
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Integration of GEMs into Preclinical Evaluation
The availability of GEMs of PanIN and PDA are welcomed additions to preclinical therapeutic investigations, as GEMs seem to recapitulate cardinal features of human PanIN and PDA, such as genetic heterogeneity and cellular diversity in the tumor microenvironment. However, it is currently unproven whether GEMs will more closely predict therapeutic efficacy in pancreatic cancer patients than the current Food and Drug Administration standard of tumor xenografts. Indeed, the failure of farnesyl transferase inhibitors serves as a poignant reminder that efficacy assessments in GEMs can be extremely misleading, particularly when there are major discrepancies between the disease and pathways being modeled in the GEMs and those present in human patients [i.e., overexpressed oncogenic HRAS in a mouse mammary tumor model (10) compared with physiologically expressed oncogenic KRAS in a patient's pancreatic or colorectal tumor]. To avoid this pitfall in the future, GEMs that best recapitulate the genetic and biological features of PanIN/PDA will likely be the most informative for these efforts. Additionally, because it is controversial whether genes that contribute to the ex vivo transformation of murine cells will have the same importance in human neoplasms (11), tumor dependency pathways in GEMs will ideally be identified by in vivo genetic and pharmacologic approaches. An additional concern is the oftentimes unpredictable pharmacokinetic properties of compounds in mice compared with humans and the lack of necessary expertise for pharmacologic measurements in most academically based laboratories. Finally, the identification of pharmacodynamic variables in GEMs for translation to the clinic requires exquisite cross-species similarities in response to target inhibition.
Infrastructural Needs
For these preclinical therapeutic efforts in GEMs to be successful, core facilities and services similar to those necessary for the proper conduct of investigational human clinical trials will be required. Specifically, six areas were identified as critical components for a successful program. First and foremost, a high-throughput murine pathology core is needed for uniform tissue processing, banking, and analysis in coordination with a trained veterinary pathologist (or human pathologist with specialty training with murine pancreatic cancer GEMs). Second, cutting edge pharmacodynamic monitoring will require the availability of molecular diagnostics including murine-specific cytogenetics, genomics, and proteomics. Third, accessibility of a pharmacokinetics laboratory is crucial for the rapid assessment of drug and metabolite levels obtained from murine pancreatic tissues. Fourth, a small animal imaging facility with instruments capable of detecting pancreatic tumors by anatomic or functional modalities will enable the appropriate enrollment of mice into prevention or intervention trials and facilitate noninvasive disease monitoring. Fifth, a preclinical therapeutics core with chemical biology and some medicinal chemistry expertise can coordinate the ex vivo identification of chemical compounds that target the cell autonomous compartment. Finally, formal interactions with biostatisticians will be necessary for proper trial design and data interpretation. Importantly, institutional and national financial commitment will be needed to establish such an infrastructure for the scientific community.
Targets to Evaluate with GEMs
Although many potential molecular targets for therapeutic intervention exist in PDA, no inhibitors have yet been described that show marked efficacy in patients. Oncogenic KRAS remains an intractable target despite extensive efforts by the academic and private sectors. Alternatively, the kinase suppressor of Ras seems to be required for KRAS oncogenicity and can be inhibited by antisense approaches in preclinical studies, according to Richard Kolesnik (Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, New York, NY; ref. 12). Recent interest has focused on the inhibition of the developmental pathways Notch (13) and Hedgehog (14, 15) in PDA, and several agents are likely to begin clinical assessment shortly. Inhibition of mitogenic receptor tyrosine kinases, including epidermal growth factor receptor, Her2/neu, and vascular endothelial growth factor receptor (VEGFR), with small molecules or ligand-sequestering antibodies is under clinical evaluation. Additionally, Douglas Hanahan (University of California San Francisco) presented data that concomitant blockade of pericytes with platelet-derived growth factor receptor inhibition and endothelial cells with VEGFR inhibition could synergistically inhibit angiogenesis and tumor progression in an islet cell carcinoma model (16). Matrix metalloproteinases were previously considered attractive targets before negative data in several clinical trials (17) and the future investment in this target seems uncertain. Notably, many of these putative targets exist in the described GEMs of pancreatic cancer, which should allow clarification of their importance before clinical assessment.
| Early Detection of Exocrine Pancreatic Cancer Using GEMs |
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The panel enthusiastically recommended the collection of multiple tissues (blood, pancreatic tissue, and pancreatic juice) from GEMs of advanced PanIN to pursue proteomic, genetic, and epigenetic biomarkers across all available platforms. Potential drawbacks to investigating biomarkers in GEMs include the genetically engineered bias inherent to the models, the possible lack of correlation between the mouse and human samples, and the potential contribution of pancreatic fibrosis and pancreatitis in the murine samples. These caveats notwithstanding, the panel suggested five areas of investigation with respect to biomarker discovery in GEMs. (a) Prospective biomarkers of PanIN-3 and PDA in mice would be validated in parallel human PDA specimens using appropriate reagents. (b) Adult onset diabetes mellitus is occasionally noted in patients before the diagnosis of PDA (19); therefore, GEMs should be evaluated for hyperglycemia during the progression of PanIN and onset of PDA to determine if diabetes correlates with the presence of specific biomarkers. (c) Anatomic and functional imaging of disease progression should be coordinated with biomarker discovery efforts to ensure proper disease classification and facilitate the identification of biomarkers of disease evolution. (d) Assessment of biomarkers of disease response should be pursued by genetically reversing the underlying state in vivo and/or using efficacious pharmacologic strategies. (e) Information obtained from the GEMs could be used to develop mathematical models that correlate disease pathogenesis with the presence of markers.
| Summary |
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| Appendix A. Pancreatic Cancer in Mice and Man: The Penn Workshop 2004 |
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| Acknowledgments |
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The costs of publication of this article were defrayed in part by the payment of page charges. This article must therefore be hereby marked advertisement in accordance with 18 U.S.C. Section 1734 solely to indicate this fact.
We thank the speakers, breakout committee cochairs, and mouse modelers, who are all listed in Appendix 1.
| Footnotes |
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7 J. Abbruzzese, personal communication. ![]()
Received 10/31/05. Accepted 11/ 8/05.
| References |
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-induced changes in epithelial differentiation during pancreatic tumorigenesis. Cancer Cell 2003;3:56576.[CrossRef][Medline]This article has been cited by other articles:
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J. P. Morton, D. S. Klimstra, M. E. Mongeau, and B. C. Lewis Trp53 Deletion Stimulates the Formation of Metastatic Pancreatic Tumors Am. J. Pathol., April 1, 2008; 172(4): 1081 - 1087. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF] |
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M. Aichler, H. Algul, D. Behne, G. Holzlwimmer, B. Michalke, L. Quintanilla-Martinez, J. Schmidt, R. M. Schmid, and M. Brielmeier Selenium status alters tumour differentiation but not incidence or latency of pancreatic adenocarcinomas in Ela-TGF-{alpha} p53+/ mice Carcinogenesis, September 1, 2007; 28(9): 2002 - 2007. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF] |
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H. Funahashi, M. Satake, D. Dawson, N.-A. Huynh, H. A. Reber, O. J. Hines, and G. Eibl Delayed Progression of Pancreatic Intraepithelial Neoplasia in a Conditional KrasG12D Mouse Model by a Selective Cyclooxygenase-2 Inhibitor Cancer Res., August 1, 2007; 67(15): 7068 - 7071. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF] |
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J. P. Morton, M. E. Mongeau, D. S. Klimstra, J. P. Morris, Y. C. Lee, Y. Kawaguchi, C. V. E. Wright, M. Hebrok, and B. C. Lewis Sonic hedgehog acts at multiple stages during pancreatic tumorigenesis PNAS, March 20, 2007; 104(12): 5103 - 5108. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF] |
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R. D. Cardiff, M. R. Anver, G. P. Boivin, M. W. Bosenberg, R. R. Maronpot, A. A. Molinolo, A. Y. Nikitin, J. E. Rehg, G. V. Thomas, R. G. Russell, et al. Precancer in Mice: Animal Models Used to Understand, Prevent, and Treat Human Precancers Toxicol Pathol, October 1, 2006; 34(6): 699 - 707. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF] |
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