Normal pancreatic acinar cells are difficult to maintain on traditional plastic culture surfaces due to their physical properties of housing large quantities of digestive enzymes and the formation of intercellular tight junctions and gap junctions (Apte and Wilson 2005; Rukstalis et al., 2003). However, placing primary acinar cells within a 3-dimensional matrix (3D-culture) maintains the cells ...

To examine mechanisms that might be related to biliary pancreatitis, we examined the effects of pancreatic duct ligation (PDL) with pancreatic stimulation in vivo. PDL alone caused no increase in pancreatic levels of trypsinogen activation peptide (TAP), trypsin, or chymotrypsin and did not initiate pancreatitis. Although bombesin caused zymogen activation within the pancreas, the increases wer...

The pancreatic exocrine secretory response to different combinations of the pancreozymin-like peptide caerulein and secretin was studied in 110 healthy control subjects and 32 patients with pancreatic disease. A combination of 0-5 CU/kg-h secretin and 75 ng/kg-h caerulein provided maximal or near-maximal stimulation of the secretion of both bicarbonate and pancreatic enzymes. The combination of...

The selection of topics, caliber of participants and content of the proceedings of this symposium reflect the high standards of the Ciba Foundation for scientific excellence. The broad range of topics covered by international authorities, together with the discussion, has been extremely well edited and the material is compiled in a logical sequence. The section on ultrastructure and histochemis...

Pancreatic elastase-1 (EL-1) is a specific human protease synthesised by the acinar cells. It is stable, unaffected by exogenous pancreatic enzyme treatment, and correlates well with stimulated pancreatic function tests. We report our experience of EL-1 measurements in 142 patients from a large cystic fibrosis (CF) clinic. The median patient age was 7.7 years (range, 0.1-20.8 years), 93 were ho...

Pancreatic cancer has a 5-year survival rate of less than 4%. Despite advances in diagnostic technology, pancreatic cancer continues to be diagnosed at a late and incurable stage. Accurate biomarkers for early diagnosis and to predict treatment response are urgently needed. Since alteration of glucose metabolism is one of the hallmarks of cancer cells, we proposed that pyruvate kinase type M2 (...