A central research portal for mining pancreatic clinical and molecular datasets and accessing biobanked samples

The Pancreas Genome Phenome Atlas (PGPA) is dedicated to the analysis of pancreatic datasets from four primary sources (Cancer Genome Atlas, International Cancer Genome Consortium, Cancer Cell Line Encyclopaedia, Genomics Evidence Neoplasia Information Exchange) that together form the foundation of -omics profiling of pancreatic malignancies and related lesions (n=7,760 specimens). Multiple user-friendly analytical tools to explore the associated molecular data from these primary specimens and cell lines are available. Crucially, PGPA is the access point for Pancreatic Cancer Research Fund Tissue Bank - the only national pancreatic cancer biobank in the UK, and will facilitate effective sharing of multi-modal molecular, histopathology and imaging data from biobank samples (>60,000 specimens from >3,400 cases and controls; 2,037 H&E images from 349 donors) and accelerate validation of in silico findings in patient-derived material. This places PGPA at the forefront of biomarker-based research, providing the user community with a distinct resource to facilitate hypothesis-testing on public data, validate novel research findings, and access curated, high-quality patient tissues for translational research. To demonstrate the practical utility of PGPA, we investigate somatic variants associated with established transcriptomic subtypes and disease prognosis: several patient-specific variants are clinically actionable and may be leveraged for precision medicine.