Despite advances for the treatment of cancer, the prognosis for patients suffering from malignant brain tumors remains dismal. High-grade neoplasms, such as gliomas, are highly invasive and spawn widely disseminated microsatellites that have limited the efficacy of surgical and a ...
Multiple drug resistance, mediated by the expression and activity of ABC-transporters, is a major obstacle to antineoplastic therapy. Normal tissue stem cells and their malignant counterparts share MDR transporter activity as a major mechanism of self-protection. Although MDR ac ...
The zebrafish (Danio rerio) has become an increasingly utilized and relevant model organism in the study of cancer. The use of transgenic and reverse genetic approaches has yielded several strains that model a variety of human neoplasms. In addition to modeling human disease, these strains p ...
Metastatic spread of cancer cells from the primary tumors to distant vital organs, such as lung, liver, brain, and bone, is responsible for the majority of cancer-related deaths. Cancer stem cells are likely to play essential roles in the metastatic spread of primary tumors because of their self-r ...
Multiple myeloma (MM) is a clonal neoplasm of terminally differentiated plasma cells (PCs). Conventional cytogenetic analysis is one of the widely accepted DNA genome-screening tools for identification of chromosomal aberrations in MM. The success rate of detection of abnormal ka ...
Multiple myeloma (MM), like other hematological malignancies, has both normal and clonal neoplastic cells coresiding in the bone marrow. To perform interphase fluorescent in situ hybridization (FISH) analysis accurately, for the detection of clonal chromosome abnormalities, ...
Multiple myeloma is a plasma cell disorder characterized at the cytogenetic level by aneuploid karyotypes with numerous complex structural aberrations. Unfortunately, conventional chromosome-banding techniques are unable to resolve many of these aberrations. Multico ...
Chromosome analysis has become an important diagnostic tool in the assessment of patients with multiple myeloma. Conventional cytogenetic analysis of myeloma cells is complicated by the difficulty in inducing myeloma cells to divide. A method for the culture and harvest of bone marrow s ...
Multiple myeloma is characterized by proliferation of monoclonal plasma cells (PCs), mostly in the bone marrow. The proliferative rate of the malignant plasma cell is an important determinant of the disease biology and can be measured as the percentage of PCs in the S-phase of the cell cycle. This p ...
Multiparametric immunophenotyping of multiple myeloma (MM) and other plasma cell (PC) dyscrasias represents an attractive approach not only for research purposes but also in clinical practice. Based on well-established antigenic patterns, discrimination between myelom ...
The fast advance of genomic science and nucleic acid detection technology provides medical researchers new tools for detecting genetic and expressional variations of individuals and their relations to pathology, etiology, and diagnostics. DNA microarrays, also called DNA chip ...
Methylation-specific polymerase chain reaction (MSP) is a method that can rapidly assess the methylation status of virtually any group of CpG sites within a CpG island, independent of the use of methylation-sensitive restriction enzymes. This assay entails the initial modification ...
Defects in the mismatch repair system are associated with a microsatellite unstable phenotype. In this chapter, we describe the preparation of purified plasma cells using CD138 magnetic microbeads as a source of tumor DNA. We also describe a robust, sensitive method for compar- ing microsa ...
Expanded T-cell clones in the peripheral blood of patients with multiple myeloma and smoldering myeloma are usually CD8 positive and persist over long periods, suggesting that they are the result of chronic antigenic stimulation. The presence of enlarged T-cell clones can be demonstrat ...
Multiple myeloma (MM) is a B-cell neoplasm in which malignant plasma cells accumulate in the bone marrow and produce lytic bone lesions and excessive amounts of a monoclonal protein (usually an immunoglobulin of the IgG or IgA type or free light chain). Approximately 14,000 new cases of MM are diagn ...
Much of the morbidity and mortality associated with the plasma cell (PC) malignancy, multiple myeloma (MM), is owing to the severe osteolytic bone disease seen in patients with this disease. Although the molecular mechanisms responsible for osteolysis remain to be fully elucidated, it is cl ...
Tumor cells engineered to express immunogenes have been used for cancer vaccines to induce antitumor immunity and to study the antitumor immune mechanisms derived from immunogene expression. In this chapter, we describe the design and methods for cloning a cDNA gene coding for the mouse CD4 ...
Dendritic cell (DC)—tumor fusion hybrid vaccine that facilitates antigen presentation represents a new, powerful strategy in cancer therapy. We investigated the antitumor immunity derived from vaccination of fusion hybrids between wild-type J558 or engineered J558-IL-4 mye ...
Telomerase is an enzyme that has been attracting much attention in recent years because its activities are so central to the processes of malignant transformation. It is a reverse transcriptase enzyme that can synthesize telomeric DNA using its own RNA component as a template. Without telom ...
Multiple myeloma is a B-cell neoplasm characterized by the monoclonal proliferation of plasma cells in the bone marrow, the development of osteolytic lesions, and the induction of angiogenesis. These different processes require three-dimensional interactions, with both humor ...

