In addition to that, in correlation to mRNA expression levels, protein levels of both Npy and Faim2 in normal pancreatic tissues were significantly higher than in PDAC tumour tissues, in the Clinical Proteomic Tumour Analysis Consortium (CPTAC) Confirmatory/Discovery dataset (Fig. 8A), further validating down-regulation in PDAC (Additional file 2: Fig S9B). Here, NPY is linked to neoplasm.