World's First Cell-Level Pancreatic Cancer Prognosis and Target Discovery Platform Opens for Sharing

After five years of work, a team led by Professor Yu Xianjun, President of Fudan University Shanghai Cancer Center, and Dr. Shi Si, Deputy Director of the Pancreatic Tumor Center, has broken through the limitations of conventional bulk tissue sequencing. By integrating high-precision single-nucleus sequencing data from 152 pancreatic cancer patients with long-term clinical follow-up information, the team constructed a panoramic gene expression-survival atlas covering 23 cell types and built ctPANDA, the world's first cell-type-resolution platform for pancreatic cancer prognosis analysis and target discovery.

The platform opened for public sharing on June 11, and the findings were published in Cancer Cell (impact factor 44.5). The team systematically identified "dual-faced genes" in pancreatic cancer for the first time: for example, high CD44 expression in cancer cells indicates poor prognosis, whereas high expression in immune T cells predicts longer survival. They also screened out PLOD2 as a pan-cell-type target, and found that a "triple complex" formed by three clusters of poor-prognosis cells is the core cause of resistance to neoadjuvant therapy.