Pancreatic Cancer, 2005 Methods and Protocols Methods in Molecular Medicine Series, Vol. 103

Pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma is the fourth leading cause of cancer death in the United States. Annually approximately 30,000 Americans are diagnosed with the disease and most will die from it within five years. P- creatic ductal adenocarcinoma is unique because of its late onset in age, high mortality, small tumor samples infiltrated with normal cells, and a lack of both early detection and effective therapies. Some of these characteristics have made studying this disease a challenge. Pancreatic cancer develops as a result of the accumulation of genetic alterations in cancer-causing genes, such as the oncogenes and the tumor-s- pressor genes. In the last decade, major progress has been made in identifying important oncogenes and tumor-suppressor genes for the disease. In Panc- atic Cancer: Methods and Protocols, we review the classical techniques that have contributed to the advances in pancreatic research and introduce new strategies that we hope will add to future breakthroughs in the field of cancer biology. Pancreatic Cancer: Methods and Protocols provides a broad range of protocols for molecular, cellular, pathological, and statistical analyses of s- radic and familial pancreatic cancer. It covers topics from in vitro cell c- tures to in vivo mouse models, DNA to protein manipulation, and mutation analyses to treatment development. We believe that our book will prove an invaluable source of proven protocols for those who are interested in either basic or translational research in pancreatic cancer.

Identification and Analysis of Precursors to Invasive Pancreatic Cancer.- Optimal Molecular Profiling of Tissue and Tissue Components.- Immunohistochemistry and In Situ Hybridization in Pancreatic Neoplasia.- Practical Methods for Tissue Microarray Construction.- Xenografting and Harvesting Human Ductal Pancreatic Adenocarcinomas for DNA Analysis.- Culture and Immortalization of Pancreatic Ductal Epithelial Cells.- DNA Methylation Analysis in Human Cancer.- Digital Single-Nucleotide Polymorphism Analysis for Allelic Imbalance.- Representational Difference Analysis as a Tool in the Search for New Tumor Suppressor Genes.- Serial Analyses of Gene Expression (SAGE).- Oligonucleotide-Directed Microarray Gene Profiling of Pancreatic Adenocarcinoma.- Identification of Differentially Expressed Proteins in Pancreatic Cancer Using a Global Proteomic Approach.- Detection of Telomerase Activity in Patients with Pancreatic Cancer.- Serological Analysis of Expression cDNA Libraries (SEREX).- Modeling Pancreatic Cancer in Animals to Address Specific Hypotheses.- Strategies for the Use of Site-Specific Recombinases in Genome Engineering.- Primary Explant Cultures of Adult and Embryonic Pancreas.- Zebrafish as a Model for Pancreatic Cancer Research.- Development of a Cytokine-Modified Allogeneic Whole Cell Pancreatic Cancer Vaccine.- Overview of Linkage Analysis.

Includes supplementary material: sn.pub/extras