Since improving the survival of pancreatic cancer will require early detection or identification of lesions before they become established cancer, the goal of this investigation was to analyze the ability of a fluorescent CCK-BR-targeted NP micelle as an imaging tool to detect precancerous PanIN lesions in vivo in the mutant KRAS mouse pancreas, before pancreatic cancer occurs. The gene discussed is KRAS; the disease is pancreatic neoplasm.