细胞技术

Lung cancer is the number one cause of cancer-related death in the US. In 2001, it is estimated that approx 180,000 new patients will be diagnosed, and close to 90% of them will die of the disease (1). The major reasons for such dismal prognoses are the lack of effective preventive and early therapeutic interve ...

The successful treatment of lung cancer, as with all cancers, is determined by the selectivity of the therapy. That is, the cells that have undergone carcinogenic changes must be eradicated, while normal cells must be preserved. With therapeutic agents that are not discriminating, signifi ...

“Hypothesis-driven chemoprevention of lung cancer, when put to the test of randomized large-scale clinical trials, so far has been disappointing, unlike important successes with selective estrogen receptors modulators for breast cancer and non steroidal anti-inflammatory d ...

Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer death in the United States (1). Many tumors, including lung cancer, have the capacity to promote immune tolerance and escape host immune surveillance (2). Tumors utilize numerous pathways to inhibit immune responses including the elaboration of imm ...

The central importance of functional host professional antigen-presenting cell (APC) in the immune response against cancer has been well-defined (1). Dendritic cells (DC) are highly specialized professional APC with potent capacity to capture, process, and present antigen to T cells ...

Murine models of pulmonary tumors have long provided investigators a reliable and reproducible method of testing the therapeutic efficacy of adoptive immunotherapy. Adoptive immunotherapy involves the generation of tumor-specific immune cells which, following activat ...

The rapid advances that have taken place in tumor immunology within the past decade have fostered renewed interest in the use of immune-based therapies for the treatment of cancer (1,2). Numerous strategies, which aim to provoke and augment anti-tumor immunity in cancer patients, have been de ...

Limited advances have occurred in lung cancer prevention and treatment (1), which has necessitated the investigation of other means of intervention.As cancer is a disease of altered cellular homeostasis and genetic damage, programmed cell death (PCD) has gained increasing importa ...

Antisense oligonucleotides (AONs) are one of the several types of “antisense therapeutics” designed to modulate specific gene expression at the mRNA level. Although antisense strategies also include ribozymes (RNA enzyme) and, more recently, DNAzymes (a DNA analog of a ribozyme), AONs ...

Inactivation of p53wt, a tumor-suppressor gene, has been observed in a majority of small cell and non-small cell lung cancers (SCLC/NSCLC) (1,2). Many tumors that frequently metastasize to lung, such as colon, breast, liver, melanoma, and bone, also exhibit a high incidence of p53 mutations and del ...

Lung cancer is one of the leading causes of cancer death in the world (1). The high mortality rate for lung cancer may be due to either or both the absence of standard clinical procedures for early diagnosis of tumors compared to breast, prostate, and colon cancers, and lack of effective treatments in more ad ...

Gene therapy for lung cancer has great potential to treat and possibly cure one of the most deadly diseases in man. Various methods are being developed to treat lung cancer by the delivery and expression of a specific gene or genes) to the lung. These methods are intended to exploit the antineoplastic pr ...

Different methods for delivery of genes to the lungs such as intravenous injection, and nasal, or intratracheal instillation have been reported in animal models. However, these strategies are invasive or they may not distribute the material uniformly throughout pulmonary tissues. C ...

We have been investigating intrapleural malignancy as a “proof of concept” clinical model for the gene therapy of non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC). Our focus has been to use malignant pleural effusions (MPE) to model an in vivo milieu, and to assess the transduction efficiency of tumor cells in this ...

In spite of the significant advances made in the conventional treatment modalities currently available for the treatment of lung cancer, this malignancy remains the most frequent cause of cancer death in North America. In recent years, therefore, much attention has been given to identify n ...

Photodynamic therapy (PDT) involves the use of photosensitizing agents for treatment of malignant disease. These photosensitizing agents are infused intravenously and are selectively retained within tumor cells. The agents remain inactive until exposed to light of the proper w ...

During the 1990s, thoracic radiotherapy (RT) combined with chemotherapy was accepted as a “new” gold standard for patients with good performance status locally advanced/inoperable non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC). This paradigm shift away from RT alone has raised several fundame ...

From the fortuitous beginning of surgery of the chest in the 15th century to the scientific discoveries of the 17th–19th centuries, a body of knowledge was acquired that enabled the “rise of surgery from empiric craft to scientific discipline” (2). The evolution of general surgical practice and ...

Lung cancer is common in men and women, has a very poor prognosis, and is therefore a major cause of premature mortality. As such, any prospects for improved therapy are of great significance (1–4). The promise of telomerase as a therapeutic target is now close to realisation with extremely encouragi ...

Many cancers arise from gene-environment interactions, where susceptible individuals develop cancer after exposure to toxic or mutagenic environmental agents (1). Genetic instability, whether constitutional or induced, has long been suspected to predispose to carcinoge ...