Background/objectives Meaningful profiling of pancreatic cancer samples is particularly
challenging due to their complex cellular composition. Beyond tumor cells, surgical biopsies
contain desmoplastic stroma with infiltrating inflammatory cells, adjacent normal
parenchyma, and “non-pancreatic tissues”. The risk of misinterpretation rises when the
heterogeneous cancer tissues are sub-divided into smaller fragments for multiple analytic
procedures. Pre-analytic histological evaluation is the best option to characterize pancreatic …