In a discovery‐stage clinical study involving 27 pancreatic cancer patients and 13 controls, the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) of two mRNAs (WASF2 and ARF6) and two snoRNAs (SNORA74A and SNORA25) was > 0.9 for distinguishing pancreatic cancer patients from controls; the AUC of CA19‐9 was 0.897. Here, WASF2 is linked to familial pancreatic carcinoma.