A systemic look at pancreatic cancer patients: Predicting metastasis by studying the liver

In a recent paper published in Nature Medicine, Bojmar et al. describe an elaborate effort toward predicting the metastatic progress of pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) after primary tumour resection.¹ Instead of investigating the tumour, however, they studied several molecular, cellular, and metabolic features in biopsy samples from the seemingly still unaffected liver, which were collected during resection of the primary tumour, demonstrating the large and still neglected biomedical potential of looking at cancer in a systemic manner.