Australian Pancreatic Cancer Genome Initiative

Full description

The APGI is based at the Garvan Institute of Medical Research in Sydney and the Institute of Molecular Bioscience in Brisbane. Our collaborators include pancreatic cancer healthcare professionals in major cities across Australia. We also have international links with major pancreatic healthcare research centres in the USA, Canada and Italy. The goal of the APGI is to comprehensively catalogue the genomic and epigenomic abnormalities in pancreatic cancer. This will provide unprecedented new insights into the molecular biology of pancreatic cancer, and help promote research in developing new cancer treatments which are tailored towards individual patients. This will be Australia's contribution towards the world-wide efforts of the International Cancer Genome Consortium in compiling the genomic abnormalities of major human cancers and usher in the new era of personalised medicine. State of the art sequencing technologies require high quality well annotated biospecimens In order to achieve this, we are prospectively collecting and tissue banking high quality blood and tissue samples from consenting pancreatic cancer patients across Australia complete with deidentified clinical, pathological, treatment and follow-up outcome information. These specimens will then be globally sequenced using deep sequencing technologies, and the results analysed to discover potential driver and passenger mutations in pancreatic cancer.