Around 3 million people worldwide struggle with chronic pancreatitis, a condition in which the pancreas becomes inflamed, scarred and painful. There is no cure for chronic pancreatitis, and it is difficult to alter the disease trajectory after onset.

“Though patients can have the same clinical diagnosis of chronic pancreatitis, they can have very different underlying molecular drivers of that disease, which makes treatment especially difficult,” says senior author Dannielle Engle, Ph.D., assistant professor and Helen McLoraine Developmental Chair at Salk. “Our work breaks down a major barrier in the field by establishing an experimental model that preserves patient-specific disease biology and can be used to develop tailored therapies.”