Pancreatic Ductal Adenocarcinoma (PDAC) is a devastating and deadly disease, with patients (pts) mainly diagnosed in the advanced stage. The standard of care for metastatic pts is chemotherapy (gemcitabine, gemcitabine + Nab-Paclitaxel or mFOLFIRINOX) with a lack of prognostic and/or predictive biomarkers. Recently, for a very small proportion of pts, that is pts harbouring germinal BRCA1/2 mutations, the POLO trial showed that PARP-inhibitor maintenance with Olaparib increased progression-free-survival after platinum induction, but without clear overall survival (OS) benefit.
Bulk transcriptomic describes almost two different types of PDAC: classical and basal-like subtypes. However, recent single-cell data showed that even in a pure classical tumor there are a mixture of classical and basal-like cells, with different drug sensitivity. The picture is even more complex, considering the microenvironmental component of the tumor, that only recently we began to understand with single cell analysis.

This Research Topic is dedicated to original as well as review papers that will cover the topic of "single cell analysis of PDAC" from different points of view (tumor [sub]clones, immune cells, fibroblasts, stromal cells, etc), with the goal of a better understanding of the disease biology for better biologically oriented treatments. More in detail, review and original research papers about single cell RNA and/or ATACseq associated with novel spatial transcriptomics tools applied to pancreatic cancer are the target of the Research Topic.

1) Single cell analysis is the cutting edge technology to be applied today in cancer research, with potential to reveal in deep tumor biology.
2) Pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma [PDAC] (the most common type of pancreatic cancer) is a deadly and devastating disease and with bulk genomics we have not yet discovered the “Achilles Heel” of the disease.
3) Many international research programs are started on single cell analysis of human organs in health and disease (Human Cell Atlas [HCA], Human Tumor Atlas Network [HTAN], etc), including programs dedicated to PDAC.

The problem to be addressed is the complex PDAC biology: only with a better resolution (that is single cell analysis) we could solve this cancer "enigma" for a better biologically oriented therapy.
Within this Research Topic, authors should focus on a very innovative topic (single cell analysis - scRNA, scWGS, scATAC, spatial transcriptomics, etc -) applied to a very devastating disease, that is Pancreatic Ductal Adenocarcinoma (PDAC).

The papers should focus on different aspect of PDAC biology:
- Single cell tumor [sub]clones characterization.
- Single cell microenvironmental (TME) component (stromal cells, cancer-associated-fibroblasts [CAFs], etc) charachterization.
- Spatial transcriptomics to reveal in deep the relationships between cancer cells and different TME component.

Please note: manuscripts consisting solely of bioinformatics or computational analysis of public genomic or transcriptomic databases which are not accompanied by validation (independent cohort or biological validation in vitro or in vivo) are out of scope for this section and will not be accepted as part of this Research Topic.

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Frontiers in Oncology

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