前沿科技及其它

Senescence is thought to be a programmed response to protect cells from DNA damage by preventing cell cycle progression under stress conditions (1). The prolonged arrest associated with senescence limits the number of mutational hits required for tumorigenesis, supporting a role for s ...

The observation that tumors are capable of developing resistance to anticancer agents is a well-established fact in the clinic. In order to explain this phenomenon in the laboratory, fluctuation analysis has been used in a number of studies involving tumor cell lines (1–3), although it was first ...

Transfection is the process by which exogenous DNA is transferred into eukaryotic cells. This allows the functional study of a specific gene product within a cellular context. To facilitate expression of the gene of interest, it is first cloned into a vector plasmid DNA that supplies necessary ...

A survey of the Medline titles for the years 2000–2001 revealed 125 papers whose titles included the name of the androgen-sensitive prostate cancer cell line LNCaP, and 36 papers also included PC3, the most common androgen independent line. With the addition of DU145 the list of human experiment ...

Matrigel is a solubilized tissue basement membrane matrix rich in extracellular matrix proteins that was originally isolated from the Engelbreth-Holm-Swarm (EHS) mouse tumor. Although composed mainly of laminin, collagen IV, heparan sulphate, proteoglycans, and entactin (ni ...

Interactions between epithelial and stromal cells are critical to the development and maintenance of tissue development. Some of these interactions can be modeled using coculture systems. Published studies have described experiments in which ovarian carcinoma cells were cult ...

The progression of prostate cancer is accompanied by the breakdown of normal epithelial-ductal architecture. This breakdown is attributable to the loss of normal homeostatic interactions between the epithelial and stromal compartments of prostatic tissue. Complex in vitro mo ...

For the cell culturist, two types of contamination require careful monitoring and constant vigilance: the contamination of cell cultures with microbiological organisms and the contamination of one cell line with another. Both forms of contamination are extremely prevalent and ca ...

Although many mycoplasma contaminations of cell cultures remain undetected over many years and thus seem to have no apparent influence on the growth or other characteristics of the cells, this is by far a misinterpretation of the symbiotic relationship of eukaryotic cells and mycoplasm ...

Surgery, radiation therapy, and chemotherapy have been applied to the curative therapy of 50% of cancer patients in the United States during the past 100 years. It is clear that the chemotherapeutic agents used to develop curative therapy for leukemias, lymphomas, gestational malignancy, ...

The human breast and ovarian cancer susceptibility gene BRCA1 is a tumorsuppressor gene which is mutated and lost in hereditary breast and ovarian cancer, and has both alleles mutated in approximately 10-15% of cases of sporadic ovarian cancer. Studies of chromosome loss in ovarian cancer sh ...

Selectively replicating viruses may offer a new approach to cancer treatment. If successful in clinical trials, these agents will constitute a new category in the antitumoral armamentarium. Many viruses are currently being studied, and an adenovirus (ONYX-015) first entered clinic ...

Functional T cells are the central component of an effective antitumor immune response. However, in patients with renal cell carcinoma (RCC), the growth of antigenic tumors proceeds in the absence of significant T-cell responses, posing a distinct obstacle to the development of effective ...

Renal cell carcinoma is expected to account for 30,000 new cancer cases and 11,900 cancer deaths in the United States in 1999 (1). At the time of initial presentation, up to one-third of patients with renal cell carcinoma (RCC) have metastatic disease; furthermore, almost half of the patients resect ...

Idiopathic hypereosinophilic syndrome (HES) and chronic eosinophilic leukemia (CEL) are related hematological malignancies characterized by sustained, unexplained hypereosinophilia (1,500 eosinophils/μL) (1–4). The term CEL is used when there is evidence that the dise ...

During the last decade, many mutations present in myeloid leukemias have been molecularly characterized. Several of these mutations have clear prognostic impact. The molecular screening of these mutations has now become an essential part in several risk-adapted international cl ...

The prevalence of an internal tandem duplication (ITD) of the juxtamembrane domain-coding sequence and a missense mutation of D835 within the kinase domain of the FLT3 gene is 15–35% and 5–10% of adults with acute myeloid leukemia (AML), respectively. In addition, point mutations, deletions, a ...

The Wilms tumor gene was identified as a tumor suppressor gene responsible for a particu-lar type of kidney tumor. Several years ago, it was demonstrated that it is also overexpressed in acute and chronic leukemias. Although the exact role of this gene in the hematopoietic system is still quite comp ...

A cluster of differentiation (CD) antibody microarray called the DotScan microarray has been developed that enables an extensive immunophenotype to be obtained for a suspension of leukocytes in a single analysis. For a leukemia with a leukemia count of greater than 10 � 109/L, the immunophen ...

Accurate diagnosis and classification of leukemias are the bases for the appropriate management of patients. The diagnostic accuracy and efficiency of present methods may be improved by the use of microarrays. The followin g chapter gives an overview of the method of gene expression profi ...