The pancreas plays a crucial role in managing the body’s metabolism by producing important hormones, like insulin, and digestive enzymes. It is filled with tiny blood vessels, called capillaries, which help deliver nutrients and support the pancreas’s functions. Special cells, called endothelial cells (ECs), line these capillaries and are essential for the pancreas’s development and health. When these cells don’t work well, it can lead to pancreas-related diseases, such as diabetes and cancer.
Studying pancreatic endothelial cells (pECs) is important for understanding how the pancreas works and how diseases develop. Although mouse models are often used for research, extracting enough pECs from the mouse pancreas has been challenging due to their small numbers and the risk of cell damage from digestive enzymes in the pancreas. To overcome these obstacles, we developed a reliable method to isolate healthy pECs from the mouse pancreas. This new approach combines gentle techniques to separate the cells and a selection process to enrich the ECs, resulting in higher quality cells that can be used for various experiments. This protocol could be useful for research on many diseases and in different mouse models.