Endocrine, Metabolic, Inflammatory Biomarkers to Identify Highgrade Dysplasia/invasive Carcinoma in Patients with IPMN of the Pancreas

Under the hypotheses that a more accurate patients selection could limit the problem of overtreatment and that benign intraductal papillary mucinous neoplasms (IPMN) have a distinguishable Endocrine/Metabolic/Inflammatory (EMI) profile from those with high-grade disease/invasive carcinoma, this study has three specific aims. The first aim is to evaluate and confirm the accuracy of the updated versions of International and European guidelines for the management of IPMN and it will be addressed by retrospectively applying the criteria included in the two guidelines on 350 patients with resected IPMN in order to determine the most accurate criteria to identify High Grade Dysplasia(HGD)/Invasive Carcinoma (IC). The second aim is to identify pre-operative biological and/or radiological/endosonographic biomarker(s) able to distinguish low- versus high-risk IPMN for cancer progression in a prospective study by enrolling a cohort of 186 (of which 145 surgically-resected) patients. The third aim is to prospectively validate biological and/or radiological/endosonographic biomarker(s) (previously identified and optimized) on a new cohort of 50 patients with IPMN undergoing surgical resection.