Quantitative Donor Histology and Transcriptomics Link Pancreatic Composition and Precancers Across the Adult Lifespan

Quantitative histology of 410 GTEx pancreases shows PanIN is present in 83% of donors, while the 90th-percentile burden rises from 0.21% to 0.72% of exocrine tissue with age.

• Why it matters: PanIN is common but PDAC is rare, and prior work focused on presence or grade rather than how much precancer burden accumulates across adulthood.
• What they did: Using CODAvision deep-learning segmentation on 410 pancreas sections (ages 21–70), the study tested 27 donor phenotypes against 14 compositional measures and linked composition to bulk gene expression in 281 donors.
• The result: High-outlier PanIN burden (10% of sections) is disproportionately linked to type 2 diabetes mellitus and hypertension and to inflamed, fibrotic stroma with denser fibroblast and immune-cell populations, and PanIN abundance associates with a gastric transcriptional signature including VSIG1, TFF1, and MUC5AC.

AI summary of the abstract · may contain errors · not medical advice · read the paper.