The central goal of this Core Resource is to maintain and provide a research of pathology documented and extended pancreatic cancer prone families that can be made available to investigators within the SPORE and from other SPOREs for their individual research projects. This registry of families and repository for frozen lymphocytes and serum that has been obtained from pancreatic cancer affected family members is housed at Creighton University's Hereditary Cancer Institute. In an ongoing collaboration with the oncology units at Creighton University, the University of Nebraska Medical Center, Duke University, Durham, NC and M D Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, TX, additional pancreatic cancer prone families will be accrued by interviewing a consecutive series of pancreatic cancer patients to determine their family cancer histories. Family histories will be extended by paying special attention to medical, genetic, pathology, and natural history features, as well as environmental carcinogens. In addition, the molecular biology laboratory at Creighton will prepare and archive lymphocyte and pancreatic tissue DNA. This will function in conjunction with Scott Kern, M.D., from Johns Hopkins University, toward the identification of new genes important in pancreatic tumorigenesis (mutations of p16 already identified by Dr. Kern in one of our families). Detailed analyses of pancreatic cancer pronce families are likely to provide important clues about the etiology and prevention of pancreatic cancer, which should harbor an important translational potential for patient benefit.
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