前沿科技及其它

The diphenylamine assay is a very useful tool in measuring apoptosis by determining the percentage of fragmentation of known amounts of DNA into oligosomal-sized fragments. Another advantage of the diphenylamine assay is that apoptotic DNA fragmentation can be analyzed in both adher ...

As a genetically controlled program, apoptosis has important roles in a variety of biological processes. The realization that chemotherapy can also induce apoptosis in some cancer cells both in vitro and in vivo indicates apoptosis may play a very important role in cancer and cancer therapy ( ...

The deregulation of the balance between proliferation and programmed cell death is considered one of the most important features of malignant tumors. The search for new markers, which may reflect the tumor progress and response to various therapy regimens, has recently focused on altera ...

Programmed cell death or apoptosis can be induced by a variety of mechanisms including genotoxic stress (1-3). The initiation of apoptosis involves the activation of a proteolytic cascade reminiscent of the blood-clotting pathway or activation of pancreatic proteases (4). It has been su ...

Cellular heterogeneity of malignant tissues is a well-known phenomenon (1). Intralineal/intraclonal diversity may be explained in part by proposing the concept of a hierarchically ordered, differentiating and self-renewing stem cell system for transformed cell populations ...

Human tumor cell lines have provided valuable model systems to study a wide variety of tumor characteristics including the cell biology, genetics, and chemosensitivity profiles of disease. A large number of ovarian cancer cell lines have now been established and are in widespread use Table 1) ...

Perhaps the most fundamental question that faces the laboratory scientist is, “Which model system should I use to investigate the problem?” Failure to adequately address this issue can compromise even the most meticulous and inspired research program. If this is such a thorny issue, why use mo ...

Since ancient times, cancer has been known to humankind. The ancient Greeks and Romans have left us with writings in which various treatment options are discussed (1). Disease processes and causes were not well understood, however; the humoral pathology established by the ancient Greeks of the ...

Human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG), a glycoprotein hormone composed of two nonidentical α- and β-subunits, is normally produced by trophoblasts. Serum and urine from some patients with nontrophoblastic tumors are found to contain similar immunoactivity to the β-subunit of hCG and th ...

The most important prognostic parameters for gynecologic malignancies are tumor stage, residual tumor after surgical treatment, histological subtype, and degree of malignancy (1-2). However, these factors present an incomplete picture of the tumor biology. Therefore, invest ...

Interleukin-6 (IL-6) is a multifunctional cytokine displaying diverse biologic functions that can be produced by a broad variety of normal and malignant cell types (1). In vivo, high levels of bioactive IL-6 have been detected in the ascites of patients with epithelial ovarian cancer, sugges ...

A large number of monoclonal antibodies (MAbs) to various tumor cell lines have been developed (1). However, MAbs have thus far had limited therapeutic impact in oncology, probably in part because many murine MAbs do not effectively recruit immune effector mechanisms, such as complement fix ...

Ovarian cancer arises from the accumulation of mutations in multiple combinations of genes (1). The most extensively studied tumor suppressor gene in solid tumors is p53, a 53-kD nuclear phosphoprotein that binds DNA. The p53 gene product plays a role in normal cellular proliferation by regu ...

Ovarian carcinoma is the most lethal tumor of the female genital tract and continues to be a major cause of female cancer deaths, largely as a function of early abdominal seeding producing carcinomatosis. The high rate of mortality is mainly caused by the difficulties of early detection of this dis ...

Amplification or overexpression of the c-erbB-2 oncogene (also known as HER-2, neu) is a frequent event in many types of human cancer including 20-30% of ovarian cancers where it characterizes a group of patients with poor prognosis (1,2). The expression of p185 (c-erbB-2) is in contrast quite restr ...

Overexpression of erbB-2 is important in the pathogenesis of a variety of human neoplasms. Overexpression of the erbB-2 gene product has been associated with poor clinical prognosis with respect to malignancies originating in the ovary, breast, gastrointestinal tract, salivary gla ...

Cellular transformation does not necessarily require the expression of proteins with neoantigenic properties, and for this reason, immunosurveillance does not register all tumor cells. They frequently express potentially immunogenic components, but are able to escape elim ...

One of the major failures of conventional cancer therapy has been the inability to achieve a sufficient differential in toxicity between normal and neoplastic tissues. Since hybridoma technology was established (1), monoclonal antibodies (MAbs) have been raised against a variety of t ...

Conventional medical approaches are limited in part on the prognosis of ovarian cancer. Although the advent of platinum- and taxane-based combination chemotherapy represents a significant advance in the treatment of ovarian carcinoma, the 5-yr survival of patients with intraper ...

Ovarian cancer, as used in this review on drug resistance, applies to the study of the problem in those malignant tumors which arise from the modified peritoneal mesothelial cells, which cover the ovarian surface. These tumors are, by far, the most common malignancies of the ovary and display a remar ...