Researchers find a new way to recognize early signs of pancreatic cancer

Regardless of whether you have breakfast this morning or not, your pancreas works quietly behind the scenes. This vital organ produces the enzymes that help digest their food and hormones that regulate their metabolism. But if something goes wrong with your pancreas, the consequences can be devastating.

For a good reason, pancreatic cancer deserves the dark nickname “The Silent Killer”. Until most patients have symptoms, the disease has often developed into an advanced stage in which the treatment options are severely restricted. Between 2017 and 2019, over 10,700 new cases and 9,500 deaths were recorded in Great Britain.

The most common form, pancreatic ductaladenocarcinoma (PDAC), develops in the pancreatic gang – a tube that connects the pancreas with the small intestine.

If tumors form here, you can block the flow of digestive enzymes and cause problems with the energy metabolism in which patients feel chronically tired and uncomfortable. However, these symptoms are often so subtle that they are easily released or other causes.

Now researchers are turning to an unexpected source for early PDAC recognition: faecal rehearsals. While the analysis of POO appears an unlikely approach to the cancer diagnosis, scientists discover that our waste contains a treasure of information about our health.

This is due to the fact that trillions of bacteria are located in their intestine – bacterial cells in their body are in fact around 40 trillion to 30 trillion human cells over human cells. These microscopic residents form complex communities that can reflect the condition of their health, including the presence of diseases.

Since PDAC usually develops in the part of the pancreas that are connected to the intestine and most people have regular intestinal movements, stool samples offer a practical, non-invasive window into what is happening in the body.

Build global evidence

This innovative approach was validated in studies in several countries, including Japan, China and Spain. The latest breakthrough comes from an international study of 2025, in which researchers in Finland and Iran are involved, which examined the connection between intestinal bacteria and pancreatic cancer in various populations.

The researchers collected stool samples and analyzed the bacterial DNA using a technique called 16S -RRNA -Gen -Amplicon sequencing. Despite the complex name, the principle is uncomplicated: scientists sequence and compare a genetic region that is found in the genome of each bacterium so that they can at the same time identify and count different bacterial species.

The results of the Finnish-Iranian study were striking. Patients with PDAC showed a reduced bacterial diversity in their intestine, with certain types compared to healthy people either enriched or exhausted. It is even more important that the team developed a model for artificial intelligence that could distinguish between cancer patients and healthy people that are based exclusively on their intestinal bacterial profiles.

The area of microbiom research quickly develops. While this study used amplicon sequencing, newer methods such as “metagenomic shotgun sequencing” provide even more detailed findings. This advanced technology captures the entire bacterial genome content instead of concentrating on a single gene, and offers an unprecedented resolution that can even determine whether bacteria have been recently transferred between individuals.

In our opinion, this technological advances lead to a fundamental shift in health and illness. We move from a purely humanly centered perspective to understand ourselves as a “human plus microbioma” to complex ecosystems in which our bacterial partners play a crucial role in our well-being.

Beyond pancreatic cancer

The possibilities go far beyond pancreas. At Quadram we apply similar methods to examine colon cancer. We have already analyzed over a thousand stool samples by analyzing extended arithmetic tools, the bacterial genomes and their functions made of fragmented DNA. This ongoing work aims to show how intestinal microbes behave in colon cancer, similar to other scientists for PDAC.

The bidirectional interactions between cancer and bacteria are particularly fascinating – not only certain bacterial profiles show the presence of diseases, but the disease itself can change the intestinal microbioma, as we have previously shown in Parkinson’s disease, which creates a complex web for cause that the researchers still dissolve.

By understanding how our microbial partners react and influence diseases, we receive insights that could revolutionize both diagnosis and treatment. Our previous research has shown that this is incredibly complex and sometimes difficult to understand, but developments in biotechnology and artificial intelligence are increasingly helping us to understand this microscopic world.

For cancer patients and their families, these and other progress in microbioma research offer hope for previous detection. While we are still in clinical practice in the early stages of implementing these results, the potential to catch this silent murderer before becoming fatal can change the results for thousands of patients, but it requires more careful and fundamental research.

The microbial perspective on health is no longer a distant scientific curiosity – it quickly becomes a practical reality that could save lives. While the researchers continue to examine this inner border, we learn that the answer to some of our most challenging medical questions could be in sight – in the waste that we wash away every day.

Falk Hildebrand is a researcher in bioinformatic at the Quadram Institute.

Daisuke Suzuki is a doctoral student in the intestinal microbioma at the Quadram Institute.

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