Authors: Chengcao Sun, Youqiong Ye, Zhi Tan, Yuan Liu, Yajuan Li, Wei Hu, Ke Liang, Sergey D. Egranov, Lisa Angela Huang, Zhao Zhang, Yaohua Zhang, Jun Yao, Tina K. Nguyen, Zilong Zhao, Andrew Wu, Jeffrey R. Marks, Abigail S. Caudle, Aysegul A. Sahin, Jianjun Gao, Seth T. Gammon, David Piwnica-Worms, Jian Hu, Paul J. Chiao, Dihua Yu, Mien-Chie Hung, Michael A. Curran, George A. Calin, Haoqiang Ying, Leng Han, Chunru Lin, Liuqing Yang
Published: 2023-02-01
Source: Full article
One of the major obstacles to treating pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) is its immunoresistant microenvironment. The functional importance and molecular mechanisms of Schwann cells in PDAC remains largely elusive. We characterized the gene signature of tumor-associated nonmyelinating Schwann cells (TASc) in PDAC and indicated that the abundance of TASc was correlated with immune suppressive tumor microenvironment and the unfavorable outcome of patients with PDAC. Depletion of pancreatic-specific TASc promoted the tumorigenesis of PDAC tumors. TASc-expressed long noncoding RNA (lncRNA) plasmacytoma variant translocation 1 (