In the present state of healthcare, usual medical care is generally given to the already diseased person, while the key link—personal health monitoring underlain by predictive, preventive, and personalised medicine (PPPM) techniques that are being intensively elaborated worldwide—is simply missing. It is this link, based on the recognition of subclinical conditions, prediction, and further preventive measures, that is capable of regulating morbidity and diminishing the rates of disability among able-bodied population, thus significantly cutting the traditionally high costs of treating the already diseased people. To achieve the above-mentioned goal—the elaboration of the PPPM concept and its practical implementation—it is necessary to create a fundamentally new strategy based upon the subclinical recognition of the signs—bioindicators of cryptic abnormalities long before the disease clinically manifests itself. The implementation of PPPM programme requires an adjusted technology for the proper interpretation of diagnostic data, which would allow for the current ‘physician-patient’ model to be gradually replaced by a novel model, ‘medical advisor-healthy men-at-risk’. This is the reason for an additional need in organising combinatorial scientific, clinical, training and educational projects in the area of PPPM to elicit the content of this new branch of medicine.

SOX9 is upregulated in the majority of pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma cases. It is hypothesized that the increased expression of SOX9 is necessary for the formation and maintenance of tumor phenotypes in pancreatic cancer cells. In our research, we studied six pancreatic cancer cell lines, which displayed varying levels of differentiation and a range of oncogenic mutations. We chose the method of downregulation of SOX9 expression via siRNA transfection as the main method for investigating the functional role of the SOX9 factor in pancreatic cancer cells. We discovered that the downregulation of SOX9 expression in the cell lines leads to cell-line-specific changes in the expression levels of epithelial and mesenchymal protein markers. Additionally, the downregulation of SOX9 expression had a specific effect on the expression of pancreatic developmental master genes. SOX9 downregulation had the greatest effect on the expression levels of the protein regulators of cell proliferation. In three of the four cell lines studied, the transfection of siSOX9 led to a significant decrease in proliferative activity and to the activation of proapoptotic caspases in transfected cells. The acquired results demonstrate that the SOX9 protein exerts its multiple functions as a pleiotropic regulator of differentiation and a potential promoter of tumor growth in a cell-specific manner in pancreatic cancer cells.

Fibroblast growth factors (FGFs) are signaling molecules with a wide range of actions that are involved in various processes in the body. Specifically for pancreas, FGFs are important for both...

Stimulation of BxPC-3, Panc-1, and MIA PaCA-2 pancreatic cancer cells with EGF, HGF, FGF-1, FGF-2, FGF-7, and FGF-10 growth factors caused changes in the expression of master genes regulating...

Fibroblast growth factors (FGFs) are growth factors that regulate many important biological processes, including proliferation and differentiation of embryonic cells during organogenesis. In this...