An Integrated Systems Approach to the Study of Pancreatic Cancer Systems Biology in Cancer Research and Drug Discovery

This chapter provides an overview of the different molecular technologies being exploited to elucidate the mechanisms underlying pancreatic cancer, which is key to the development of novel diagnostic and prognostic biomarkers as well as the implementation of effective therapies. We also describe approaches developed for integrated profiling analysis, discussing studies implementing a robust comparative analysis method for the study of primary data and specific data integration systems, such as the Pancreatic Expression Database, which have been designed to mine, integrate and visualise genes and pathways reported as being associated with pancreatic cancer. We discuss the International Cancer Genome Consortium project on pancreatic cancer, its data portal and underlying data mining technology. We also highlight some of the major issues that are a barrier to research efforts, in particular the lack of good clinical reporting in studies, the need for detailed controlled vocabularies and the importance of interoperability between research resources to maximise data mining and data sharing.