We are delighted to announce the release of the 2024 update to the Pancreatic Expression Database (PED), a centralised portal for clinical and laboratory researchers to access, mine and investigate a collection of molecular and clinical data from pancreatic datasets easily. The new release is powered by SNPNexus, a powerful tool for the functional annotation of known and novel genetic variation, designed to reduce analytical burden associated with large-scale genomic datasets and easily identify biologically and clinically relevant variants in patients. 

This central research portal underpins the bioinformatics of the Pancreatic Cancer Research Fund Tissue Bank (PCRFTB); the only national pancreas tissue bank that brings together world-renowned expertise from the PCRF charity, Queen Mary University of London and key NHS partners throughout the UK. The PCRFTB collects and stores tissue, blood, saliva and urine from people with pancreatic cancer and other diseases of the pancreas, alongside samples of blood, urine and saliva from first degree relatives of patient donors and other healthy volunteers.

Before applying for specimens to the Tissue Bank, researchers are encouraged to explore this bioinformatics portal. It allows researchers to view the research already undertaken and published using specimens from the PCRFTB. In keeping with the dynamic and evolving nature of integrative multi-omics workflows applied to the molecular profiling of pancreatic diseases, we have made vital new updates to the Analytics Hub. Researchers can now access and mine clinical and molecular information from large-scale publicly available pancreas derived datasets to fuel new discoveries.