February has been declared the gallbladder and bile duct cancer awareness month, but also features the international World Cancer Day. This year's theme was "United by Unique" and except for raising awareness of the disease it requested a worldwide cancer care that is focusing more on the individuals and not only on the disease.

The gallbladder is situated below the liver and is a small organ that stores bile. The bile is then transported via the bile ducts to the small intestine to aid in the digestion of fat. Gall bladder and bile duct cancers are rather rare diseases, but still there are about 120 000 new cases per year worldwide and the overall 5-year survival rate is low ranging from 5%-20%. In most cases the cancers are adenocarcinomas originating from the epithelial cells lining these organs.

Cell line models are frequently used for cancer studies and in the Human Protein Atlas Cell line resource there is data for seven cell lines originating from bile duct cancer and one cell line origination from gallbladder cancer. To get an estimation of the similarity of cell lines with the their corresponding cancer, a correlation analysis between the expression profiles of cell lines and their corresponding disease cohorts from TCGA was made. This analysis suggest the cell line SNU-1079 to be the most suitable choice for studying bile duct cancer.

Read more about the gall bladder in the Tissue resource

Explore the cell line data for gall bladder and bile duct cancer in the Cell line resource