ABOVE: ORIGIN STORY: Mucinous cysts of the pancreas may stem from primordial germ cells on their way to the gonads during embryonic development. WIKIMEDIA, TEXASPATHOLOGISTMSW
The paper
K.M. Elias et al., “Primordial germ cells as a potential shared cell of origin for mucinous cystic neoplasms of the pancreas and mucinous ovarian tumors,” J Pathol, 246:459–69, 2018.
Mucinous cysts of the pancreas typically affect young women, especially smokers. It’s rare, representing only 1 percent of all pancreatic tumors, and occurs particularly infrequently in men. “The [male:female] sex ratio is really, really weird, 1:10 to 1:20,” Sana Intidhar Labidi-Galy, a medical oncologist at Geneva University Hospitals, tells The Scientist. “We had to ask, what are these tumors doing here?”
Turning to publicly available data, she and her colleagues compared gene expression profiles of 4- to 17-week-old human primordial germ cells—cells that migrate to the gonads in the first few weeks of embryonic ...
