Jurgis Alvikas, MD
Complex General Surgical Oncology Fellow
University of Pittsburgh Medical Center
Project Description: “Platelet RNA signatures for early detection of pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma”
Pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) is an aggressive disease with poor prognosis and rising incidence. It is estimated to be the second leading cause of cancer-related death in the US by 2030. The only chance for long-term survival is surgical resection but only ~15% of PDACs are operable at the time of diagnosis. Effective methods of early detection of PDAC are therefore urgently needed. We hypothesize that circulating platelet RNA signature can distinguish patients with PDAC from patients with benign pancreatic diseases and healthy volunteers. Platelets contain a complex and dynamic repertoire of coding and non-coding RNA that respond to various stimuli. There is emerging evidence that circulating platelet RNA is altered in patients with neoplastic processes. In PDAC, several recent studies have shown significant transcriptomic and proteomic changes in circulating platelets. However, these studies were performed at a single institution and due to limited sample size, the findings have not been translated into a clinically useful tool yet. The present proposal will identify coding and non-coding platelet RNA signatures that identify PDAC and distinguish it from patients with benign pancreatic disease and from healthy volunteers. The results of this pilot study will serve as a foundation for development of larger prospective study that will validate the platelet RNA signatures.
Dr. Alvikas’s Bio: He was born in Trakai, Lithuania and emigrated to the US as a teenager. After high school in Chicago Public School system, he received my undergraduate degree at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and attended medical school at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He pursued General Surgery residency at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) and am currently a Fellow in Complex General Surgical Oncology at UPMC. The motivation for his clinical and academic work comes from deeply personal experiences with cancer. His mom’s diagnosis of breast cancer sparked my interest in medicine and led him to pursue it as a career. His grandmother was diagnosed with and died from pancreatic cancer in 2022. Witnessing this deadly disease as a family member and not a healthcare provider reinforced the his sense of urgency towards pancreatic cancer research. Innovative and ambitious research projects are necessary to improve the lives of patients affected with this disease. His hope is to translate this investigation of platelet RNA signatures as an early detection method for pancreatic cancer into a clinically meaningful tool that we can use to find pancreatic cancer at an earlier stage and treat it more effectively. Under the mentorship of Dr. Randall Brand, an expert in pancreatic cancer diagnostics, the results of this Sky Foundation-funded study will serve as a foundation for larger future studies of biomarkers for pancreatic cancer detection.