Pancreatic cancer

Pancreatic cancer is a disease where abnormal cells grow in the pancreas, often leading to symptoms like abdominal pain, weight loss, and jaundice. The most common form is pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma, which originates in the cells lining the ducts that transport digestive enzymes. Pancreatic cancer is a major cause of cancer mortality, being the seventh leading cause of cancer death worldwide (Ilic M et al. (2016)). It is an aggressive cancer that is resistant to traditional therapeutics such as chemotherapy and radiotherapy. Pancreatic cancer in particular is difficult to treat because it is often diagnosed at later stages of disease and presents few to no symptoms. However, there is a large window for early diagnosis because it can take up to 10 years for malignancies to metastasize. Some of the risk factors include smoking, alcohol consumption, obesity, age, and genetic history. Pancreatic cancer is identified through a multidetector CT scan, and progression of disease can be measured by CA19-9 for the majority of the population (MayoClinic).

Differential abundance and machine learning analysis

This section presents the disease-specific results of the differential abundance and machine learning analyses. The analyses are reported for three comparisons: 1) disease vs. all other diseases, 2) disease vs. diseases from the same class, and 3) disease vs. healthy samples.

Disease vs All other
Disease vs Class
Disease vs Healthy