Pancreatic cancer can take as long as ten years to spread to other parts of the body potentially giving doctors more time to screen and provide effective treatment for the invasive disease, studies by two research teams have revealed.

Scientists at the Sol Goldman Pancreatic Cancer Research Centre at Johns Hopkins Medicine sequenced the DNA cells of seven patients immediately after their death to the deadly disease. Their findings give hope for the diagnosis of the cancer and take steps in providing medical care to patients.

Researchers in the past have indicated that cancer cells could take as much as two decades from the level of a tumor to a stage likely for clinical diagnosis, a fact confirmed by these studies.

Another team from Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in the UK used the DNA sequencing to monitor the development and movement of cancer cells in the genome to arrive at the same conclusion .Both studies were published in the October 28 issue of Nature.