Both chemical (Quan et al., 2013; Schott et al., 2013; Kim et al., 2014) and antibody-based (Salnikov et al., 2013; Li et al., 2014; Arabi et al., 2015; Schmohl et al., 2015; Amoury et al., 2016) strategies have been evaluated to target cell surface markers, and some phase I clinical trials have proceeded for CD44 (Lin et al., 2015) and c-MET (Oguri et al., 2004; Pant et al., 2014) in pancreatic cancer. The gene discussed is CD44; the disease is familial pancreatic carcinoma.