Personalised medicine for pancreatic cancer: using endoscopic ultrasound-guided biopsy for the development of a personalised pre-clinical model of disease

While pancreatic cancer is a genetically heterogeneous disease, 90% of patients exhibit mutations in KRAS. Most patients also respond poorly to generalised treatments, suggesting that patient outcomes may depend on genetic profiling and personalised therapeutic approaches. A potential role for those approaches is explored here, using tumour tissue procured from patients via a minimally invasive sampling technique to test for KRAS mutation status and whether KRAS mutation influenced tumour response to treatment. Only KRAS wild-type tumours were sensitive to the drug. These techniques allow for rapid translational research, from biomarker discovery to clinical trials.