前沿科技及其它

In the United States, ovarian cancer is the fifth most common cause of female cancer death behind lung, breast, colorectal, and pancreatic cancers. It is estimated that 14,500 women in the United States will die of ovarian cancer in 1999 (1). Epithelial ovarian carcinoma accounts for 90% of all ovarian ...

Tumor markers are used for multiple purposes in clinical care, including screening asymptomatic subjects, differential diagnosis of symptomatic patients, treatment planning, prognosis during and immediately following treatment, and monitoring for recurrence. Genera ...

Ovarian neoplasms are notoriously heterogeneous-the World Health Organization classification (1) includes 46 different epithelial tumor types, 24 sex cord stromal types, 29 germ cell types, and 13 other categories, not including 17 other tumor-like conditions (Table 1). Many of the ...

More than 90% of epithelial ovarian cancers are clonal neoplasms that arise from the progeny of a single cell (1-3). Comparison of primary and metastatic sites from the same patient has detected similar patterns of loss of heterozygosity (LOH) on different chromosomes, inactivation of the same X ...

In recent years, there has been considerable progress in understanding the molecular events that give rise to clonal tumor development. This is best described by the steps in the development of colorectal tumors in which the activation of cellular protooncogenes and inactivation of seve ...

The ovarian surface epithelium (OSE) is the part of the pelvic mesothelium that covers the ovary. It comprises only a minute fraction of the ovary-however, it is the source of the epithelial ovarian carcinomas which are the prime cause of death from gynecological malignancies in North American a ...

The MTT (3--2,5-diphenyl tetrazolium bromide) growth assay developed by Mosmann (1) offers a simple, rapid, and precise measurement of cell viability and proliferation of adherent cell lines (2). The value of this assay is in the screening of large numbers of samples. The MTT assay, a quantitative c ...

Epithelial ovarian cancer cells spread by two major pathways. One is by exfoliation of tumor cells from the ovarian surface, with resulting implants on peritoneal surfaces such as omentum, diaphragm, and bowel serosa. The second pathway of spread of epithelial ovarian cancer is that of invas ...

The use of human tumor xenografts grown in immunodeficient animals as a model for human cancers is well established and their value depends on the extent to which their characteristics reflect the properties of a particular cancer in the clinical situation. For endocrine-sensitive tumor ...

The tumor suppressor gene tp53 is mutated, deleted, or rearranged in more than 50% of human tumors (1). Wild-type (wt) tp53 stops growth and/or induces apoptosis in most transformed cells into which it is introduced, thus restricting research of such cells. One means of studying the effects of both wt and ...

The fact that human tumor xenografts grown in immunodeficient mice have proven to be useful models of human cancer is well documented. However, the establishment of such xenografts from cell lines cultured in vitro has proven to be fraught with difficulties-these problems become even more a ...

Cytogenetics in ovarian cancer has been restricted to conventional cytogenetic analysis of G-banded metaphase chromosomes up to the early 1980s. The detection of cytogenetic changes in solid tumors was relatively limited, as cytogenetic preparations from solid tumor tissue oft ...

Resulting from problems of low yield of metaphases and poor-quality chromosomes, detection of cytogenetic changes in solid tumors has been relatively limited (1). The advent of fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH) rendered it possible to obtain “cytogenetic information” from ...

Primed in situ labeling (PRINS) was introduced by Koch and colleagues (1) for the visualization of chromosome centromeres. The concept is based on the knowledge that the alpha satellite repeat monomers at the human centromeres exhibit variation among chromosomes (2), and by targeting such ...

Interphase cytogenetics using formalin-fixed/paraffin-embedded tissue is now a well-established technique, which renders it possible to obtain “cytogenetic information” from interphase nuclei of solid tumors (1,2, for ovarian cancer, e.g., 3-8). It is the only tool to investigate ...

Chromosome microdissection is a recently developed molecular cytogenetic technique that has become increasingly important as a bridge connecting cytogenetics to molecular genetics. After a decade of effort, this approach has been developed into a useful and reproducible appr ...

In 1981, a novel transforming gene called neu, related to, but distinct from, the c-erbB protooncogene, was identified (1-3). In 1985, two groups independently isolated identical erbB-related genes from human DNA that they called HER-2 (4) and c-erbB-2 (5) located at chromosome band 17q11.2 and en ...

The term interphase cytogenetics was first used in 1986 by Cremer (1,2) to describe detection of chromosomal alterations using in situ techniques in interphase nuclei. This was a distinct advantage over conventional analyses as solid tumors could now be studied (2,3) and the possibility of a ...

This chapter is an overview, from a technical perspective, of the approaches that can be used to analyze genetic changes in ovarian cancers. Traditional gene localization methods are discussed, followed by a section on gene identification techniques. Once a putative disease-associat ...

Comparative genomic hybridization (CGH) is a powerful technique for the quantitative detection of changes in chromosome copy number (1-3). It offers an advantage over conventional cytogenetic techniques in the analysis of tumor karyotypes through its utilization of DNA as the mater ...