EPIGENETIC HETEROGENEITY In HUman PanCREATIC CANCER
Pancreatic cancer as a clinical entity demonstrates considerable heterogeneity in outcomes. Mutational profiling and transcriptional subtyping offers little insight into why some patients have durable survival but most do not. We have invested technical resources into approaching this issue from the standpoint of chromatin, to ask if a comprehensive epigenetic interrogation of highly enriched tumor cells can offer an understanding of the molecular features that affect prognosis. In these efforts we have recently developed new tools that allow us to specifically isolate intact nuclei from tumor cells, even from archival samples stored for many years - harvesting the wealth of information otherwise locked in the samples from patients who have come and - in most cases - gone.