Comment on: 'Development of PancRISK, a urine biomarker-based risk score for stratified screening of pancreatic cancer patients'.

In their recent article on biomarker-based risk of pancreatic cancer,[1] the authors analyse the potential value of Trefoil protein 1 (TFF1) as a component of a PancRISK panel. Our group has been long involved in studying pancreatic cancer.[2,3] This paper particularly attracted our attention, because some members of our group have previous experience in the study of TFF1.[4,5] In particular, we showed that copper binding, promoting the TFF1 homodimerisation, increased its motogenic activity in in vitro wound-healing assays.[4] That finding appeared to suggest a possible activity of TFF1 on cancer cell motility.

In the same period of the publication of the article by Blyuss et al.,[1] another article reported the anticancer activity of some copper complexes in pancreatic cancer cells.[6] Due to the role of copper in TFF1 activity, we might speculate that the anticancer effect of copper complexes in pancreatic cancer can be due to a possible interference of the complexes with the correct TFF1–copper interaction.

We believe that these different pieces of evidence concur in supporting a role for TFF1 in pancreatic cancer, and that this topic can be worthy of further studies.