Using a high fat, high calorie diet and the conditional Kras mouse model of pancreatic carcinogenesis, which recapitulates many features of the human disease, several investigators at UCLA and the VA put together a Program Project Grant investigating the tumor promoting effects of a Western-style Diet on pancreatic cancer development. It is necessary to explore the impact of the high fat, high calorie diet on inflammatory processes, signal transduction pathways, cell death mechanisms, and tumor-host interaction.
