Theses (MSc. Molecular Medicine)

Pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) is a carcinoma with high malignancy and fatality. It is characterized by its surrounding stroma which occupy about 70% of the total tumour volume. The tumour microenvironment is made up of several tissue component, for example, fibroblasts, pancreatic stellate cells (PSC), immune cells and extracellular matrix (ECM) proteins. The crosstalk between PDAC and stroma promotes the desmoplastic reaction around the tumour while enhancing the proliferation of PDAC. Treatment targeting the PDAC stroma tissues have yielded heterogenous result. The increase of use of omics technology in studying diseases have led to the comparison of proteomic and transcriptomic profiles of PDAC and stroma cells in this study. We have collected and applied data integration steps on a number of transcriptomic and proteomic studies which contain human PDAC and stroma samples. RStudio and DEBrowser analysis tool are utilized to explore the expression profile of the samples, as well as GO term and KEGG pathway analysis for the enriched genes. These steps were also applied to study the gene expression profile of PDAC and its metastases to identify the differentially expressed genes responsible for the proliferation of the carcinoma. Six differentially expressed genes between PDAC and stroma have been found to be commonly existing in both Transcriptomic datasets and Proteomic datasets; which are FLNB, CTSB, C1S, EFEMP2, ABI3BP, and FSTL1 genes. FGA and FGB are the two genes found to upregulated in the liver metastases of PDAC. The functional enrichment and KEGG pathway analysis of these genes were also discussed in this study.