PROJECT SUMMARY – Administrative and Biostatistics Core The overall goal of the Administrative and Biostatistics Core (Admin Core) is to facilitate research efforts toward understanding intrinsic resistance to therapy in pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDA). This will be accomplished by providing the three Research Projects (Projects) and the three Shared Resource Cores (Cores) with organizational support, professional project management, biostatistical expertise, data storage and sharing solutions, and a governance framework. The Admin Core will plan and coordinate meetings between the scientific teams, as well as between the scientific teams and the leadership groups. The Admin Core will include a Project Manager, who will provide professional project management services to ensure that stated objectives are successfully achieved. As part of this effort, the Project Manager will monitor Core activities to ensure that efforts of these cutting-edge scientific resources are integrated and coordinated, and that the Cores are operating effectively and efficiently to meet the needs of the Projects. The Project Manager will also establish a governance framework for resolving potential conflicts between team members and for managing resource utilization and budgetary concerns. The Admin Core will include a Biostatistics Unit that will be intimately involved in all experimental design and data analysis. The Biostatistics Unit will be responsible for ensuring that all experiments are sufficiently powered, and that the resulting data are analyzed using the most scientifically rigorous approaches. Novel methods will be developed when needed. One faculty-level statistician will split their effort between the Biostatics Unit and the bioinformatics team within the Tumor and Microenvironment Heterogeneity Core, coordinating communication and the transfer of data between these data analytic groups. Finally, the Admin Core will include a Data Curator who will help establish and oversee a centralized data-storage system into which all data generated by the scientific teams will be deposited and properly annotated. This resource will facilitate the integration of disparate datasets, as well as the exchange of data and reagents between the Projects, the Cores, and the external research community, as appropriate. Thus, the specific aims of the Admin Core are to: 1) provide overall organizational support including the coordination of meetings between the Projects, the Cores, and the leadership committees, 2) provide project management services to ensure that scientific objectives are achieved in an efficient and cost-effective manner, 3) provide biostatistical expertise to ensure experimental rigor and reproducibility, and 4) create and manage a centralized data storage and sharing system to enable data integration.

PROJECT NARRATIVE – Administrative and Biostatistics Core Pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma is a highly lethal malignancy that will soon become the second-leading cause of cancer-related death, in large part because patients often exhibit inherent and/or adaptive resistance to therapy. This program project will explore the epigenetic programs, signaling pathways, and metabolic adaptations that drive therapeutic resistance, with the end goal of revealing new therapeutic targets. The Administrative and Biostatistics Core will provide the leadership framework, communication pipelines, project management services, biostatistical expertise, and data storage/sharing solutions necessary to coordinate the activities of the three Research Projects and three Shared Resource Cores that comprise this P01 effort, thereby providing an organizational foundation for success.