Pancreatic Cancer Database

Abstract

Pancreatic cancer is the fourth leading cause of cancer-related deaths in the world. Around 227,000 deaths are estimated to be reported globally every year due to pancreatic cancer. Studies are being undertaken to identify sensitive and specific biomarkers for early detection of pancreatic cancer. Technological advancements in the field of genomics, transcriptomics and proteomics have facilitated high-throughput studies, providing us with a plethora of potential biomarkers for any given disease. One of the caveats researchers face with such datasets is that they are unable to compare it with other datasets due to lack of a common repository. With too many proteins as potential biomarkers, it is generally unclear to a researcher, which one holds a more promising candidature for further evaluation studies. A central repository will be helpful in integrating the enormous amount of data scattered across scientific literature and in prioritizing the systematic follow up of a potential biomarker in any given cancer. Pancreatic cancer is a malignant neoplasm with more than 45,000 new cases being reported in United States alone in the year 2013. A search in PubMed using the terms quotpancreatic cancerquot fetches more than 65,000 articles. This number clearly indicates the large volume of data on promising biomarkers for this cancer scattered in the literature. This warrants the development of a pancreatic cancer data repository. To achieve this goal, I attempted to develop a web-based resource, the Pancreatic Cancer Database (PCD) (http://www.pancreaticcancerdatabase.org/), that provides the list of experimentally observed molecular alterations at mRNA, protein and microRNA level in pancreatic cancer. PCD contains experimentally derived alterations reported at the level of mRNA, protein and microRNA (miRNA) from literature. Literature search using keywords and Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) terms in NCBI retrieved around 65,000 articles related to expression alterations in pancreatic cancer...