Abstract 4253: High expression of specific gene profiles in organoids from African American pancreatic cancer tumors

Abstract Pancreatic cancer remains one of the leading causes of cancer-related deaths in the United States with limited therapies for advanced stages of this disease. African Americans have the highest morbidity and mortality rates of pancreatic cancer compared to other racial groups. Many factors are known to contribute to this disparity such as, socioeconomic and lifestyle factors. One of the major factors contributing to this disparity is the lack of African Americans with pancreatic cancer in clinical trials or genomic databases. In order to gain insight into the biology or genetic differences that may exist in signals driving the aggressiveness of this cancer in this population more studies are needed. Innovative in vitro models are needed to investigate possible differences in molecular changes that may exist in African Americans. Studies have shown that organoids developed from metastatic and primary tumors can give sights into genetic and epigenetic changes detected in several type of cancers. Using a Human Pancreatic Adenocarcinoma TagMan Array 96 (Applied Biosystems), which contained 76 genes known to be expressed in pancreatic cancer, pancreatic organoids from African American metastatic tumors revealed high expression levels of specific genes. Usually K-ras is highly expressed in pancreatic tumors but it was not significantly expressed in the organoids from African Americans metastatic tumors. However, preliminary results from organoids, compared to pancreatic cancer cell line spheroids, showed significantly increased gene expression of HSP90AA1 (13-fold), MMP1 (36-fold), BRACA2 (20-fold), MDM2 (19-fold), RB1 (14-fold), Rel (12-fold), STAT1 (15-fold), STAT5B (5-fold), and TGFBR1 (1- fold). High expression of HSP90AA1 is related to poor prognosis, constitutively expression of STAT5B confers gemcitabine chemoresistance and promote invasiveness, and mutations in BRCA2 can increase pancreatic cancer risk. Further studies are being done to validate these findings in African American pancreatic tumors and to ascertain their relevance to the metastatic progression phenotype. Citation Format: Beverly D. Lyn-Cook, Fatemeh Nouri Emamzaden, Beverly Word, George Hammons. High expression of specific gene profiles in organoids from African American pancreatic cancer tumors abstract. In: Proceedings of the American Association for Cancer Research Annual Meeting 2024; Part 1 (Regular Abstracts) ; 2024 Apr 5-10; San Diego, CA. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2024;84 (6Suppl): Abstract nr 4253.