Lack of association between the pancreatitis risk allele CEL-HYB and pancreatic cancer

// Koji Shindo 1 , Jun Yu 1 , Masaya Suenaga 1 , Shahriar Fesharakizadeh 1 , Koji Tamura 1 , Jose Alejandro Navarro Almario 1 , Aaron Brant 1 , Michael Borges 1 , Abdulrehman Siddiqui 1 , Lisa Datta 4 , Christopher L. Wolfgang 2 , Ralph H. Hruban 1 , Alison Patricia Klein 3, 5 and Michael Goggins 1, 3, 4 1 Department of Pathology, The Sol Goldman Pancreatic Cancer Research Center, The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore, Maryland, USA 2 Department of Surgery, The Sol Goldman Pancreatic Cancer Research Center, The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore, Maryland, USA 3 Department of Oncology, The Sol Goldman Pancreatic Cancer Research Center, The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore, Maryland, USA 4 Department of Medicine, The Sol Goldman Pancreatic Cancer Research Center, The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore, Maryland, USA 5 Department of Epidemiology, Bloomberg School of Public Health, Baltimore, Maryland, USA Correspondence to: Michael Goggins, email: mgoggins@jhmi.edu Keywords: CEL, CELP, CEL-HYB, pancreatic cancer, chronic pancreatitis Received: November 14, 2016     Accepted: January 01, 2017     Published: February 07, 2017 ABSTRACT CEL-HYB is a hybrid allele that arose from a crossover between the 3’ end of the Carboxyl ester lipase ( CEL ) gene and the nearby CEL pseudogene ( CELP ) and was recently identified as a risk factor for chronic pancreatitis. Since chronic pancreatitis is a risk factor for the development of pancreatic cancer, we compared the prevalence of the CEL-HYB allele in patients with pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma to spousal controls and disease controls. The CEL-HYB allele was detected using Sanger and next generation sequencing. There was no significant difference in the prevalence of the CEL-HYB allele between cases with pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma compared to controls; 2.6% (22/850) vs. 1.8% (18/976) (p=0.35). CEL-HYB carriers were not more likely to report a history of pancreatitis. Patients with pancreatic cancer are not more likely than controls to be carriers of the CEL-HYB allele.