A systems biology perspective on cholangiocellular carcinoma development: focus on MAPK-signaling and the extracellular environment.

Background/Aims Multiple genes have been implicated in cholangiocellular carcinoma (CCC) development. However, the overall neoplastic risk is likely associated with a much lower number of critical physiological pathways. Methods To investigate this hypothesis, we extracted all published genetic associations for the development of CCC from PubMed (genetic association studies, but also studies associating genes and CCC in general, i.e. functional studies in cell lines, genetic studies in humans, knockout mice etc.) and integrated CCC microarray data. Results We demonstrated the MAPK pathway was consistently enriched in CCC. Comparing our data to genetic associations in HCC often successfully …