Acute pancreatitis is the first stage of an inflammatory disease continuum in the pancreas that can progress through recurrent acute pancreatitis to chronic pancreatitis, and which is driven by genetic susceptibility and environmental risk factors. Although many of these individual factors have been identified and investigated as potential targets for therapy, there is still no specific intervention to prevent or treat disease onset and progression. One of the likely reasons for therapeutic failure is that the pathogenesis of pancreatitis involves