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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Oncol.
Sec. Gastrointestinal Cancers: Hepato Pancreatic Biliary Cancers
Volume 15 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fonc.2025.1495500
This article is part of the Research Topic Exploring Microbial Interactions in Pancreatic Ductal Adenocarcinoma Microenvironment View all articles

Skin Microbiome Differences in Pancreatic Adenocarcinoma Patients, Individuals with Other Cancers, and Healthy Controls: A Pilot Study

Provisionally accepted
Taylor Davis Taylor Davis 1Katherine Decker Katherine Decker 2Dana Hosseini Dana Hosseini 2Gayle Jameson Gayle Jameson 1Erkut Borazanci Erkut Borazanci 1*
  • 1 HonorHealth Research Institute, Scottsdale, United States
  • 2 ProdermIQ, San Diego, United States

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    Many studies have reported the importance of the human microbiome in relationship to the overall health of its host. While recent studies have explored the microbiome's role in various types of cancer compared to healthy patients, this pilot study is the first to investigate differences in the skin microbiome composition among pancreatic adenocarcinoma patients, individuals with other cancers, and cancer-free controls. By analyzing skin swabs from the forehead and cheek of 58 participants using Next Generation Sequencing (NGS), differential abundance analysis, and machine learning techniques, the study characterizes the skin microbiome's potential associations with cancer status. The results indicated that the cancer group displayed a significantly higher mean alpha diversity compared to the control group. Additionally, a machine learning classification model achieved a mean F1 Score of 0.943 in predicting cancer status, indicating measurable differentiation in the skin microbiome between the study groups. These findings suggest that skin microbiome profiling could serve as a non-invasive biomarker for cancer detection and monitoring, which warrants a larger, longitudinal study to validate these results.

    Keywords: microbiome, Skin, Skin microbiome, Pancreatic adenocarcinoma, Dysbiosis, machine learning, Alpha diversity

    Received: 12 Sep 2024; Accepted: 13 Jan 2025.

    Copyright: © 2025 Davis, Decker, Hosseini, Jameson and Borazanci. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Erkut Borazanci, HonorHealth Research Institute, Scottsdale, United States

    Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.