The best three single-gene discriminators are KRT17, COL10A1 and CTHRC1 for pancreatic cancer, having the same classification accuracy, 93.6% on the training set and 88.5% and 80.4%, 84.6% and 73.2%, and 84.6% and 85.7% on the two test sets, respectively. Here, CTHRC1 is linked to familial pancreatic carcinoma.