Isolation of Proximal Fluids to Investigate the Tumor Microenvironment of Pancreatic Adenocarcinoma

Pancreatic adenocarcinoma (PDAC) is the fourth leading cause of cancer-related death, and soon to become the second. There is an urgent need of variables associated to specific pancreatic pathologies to help preoperative differential diagnosis and patient profiling. Pancreatic juice is a relatively unexplored body fluid, which, due to its close proximity to the tumor site, reflects changes in the surrounding tissue. Here we describe in detail the intraoperative collection procedure. Unfortunately, translating pancreatic juice collection to murine models of PDAC, to perform mechanistic studies, is technically very challenging. Tumor interstitial fluid (TIF) is the extracellular fluid, outside blood and plasma, which bathes tumor and stromal cells. Similarly to pancreatic juice, for its property to collect and concentrate molecules that are found diluted in plasma, TIF can be exploited as an indicator of microenvironmental alterations and as a valuable source of disease-associated biomarkers. Since TIF is not readily accessible, various techniques have been proposed for its isolation. We describe here two simple and technically undemanding methods for its isolation: tissue centrifugation and tissue elution.