前沿科技及其它

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 ...

Non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), a leading cause of cancer-related death for men and women worldwide, exhibits a highly variable clinical course. Death may occur within a few weeks of diagnosis at one extreme, whereas other cases have apparently benign outcomes for periods of up to 20 years with no ...

Globally, lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer death accounting for nearly one million deaths each year (1). In the United States, lung cancer accounts for approx 13% of all incident cases and 28% of all cancer deaths (2). It has been estimated that 90% of male lung cancer deaths and over 75% of female lung canc ...

Before the first clinical descriptions of the acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS), Kaposi’s sarcoma (KS) was a rare tumor among Western populations, occurring in only 0.02–0.06% per 100,000 people (1). By June and July of 1981, however, reports from California and New York described lar ...

Disease predisposing germline mutations in cancer susceptibility genes may consist of large genomic rearrangements, including deletions or duplications that are challenging, to detect and characterize using standard PCR-based mutation screening methods. Such rearran ...

The fast growing understanding of genetic pathways that mediate cancer etiology, biology, and personalized medicine leads to an increasing need for extensive and reliable mutation screening on a population or on a single patient basis. Here we describe s-RT-MELT, a novel technology that e ...

The interpretation of the numerous sequence variants of unknown biological and clinical significance (UV for “unclassified variant”) found in genetic screenings represents a major challenge in the molecular diagnosis of genetic disease, including cancer susceptibility. A fr ...

We present the routine diagnostic application of EMMA (Enhanced Mismatch Mutation Analysis�, Fluigent), a new, fast, reliable, and cost-effective method for mutation screening. This method is based on heteroduplex analysis by capillary electrophoresis and relies on the use of innov ...

Denaturing high performance liquid chromatography (DHPLC) facilitates automated mutation scanning of PCR products with the ability to detect nearly 100% of sequence variants including single nucleotide substitutions and small insertions or deletions. It has particular ap ...

Women with a family history of breast cancer have mutations in one of the breast cancer susceptibility genes, BRCA1 or BRCA2. Since the discovery of these two genes, around 100,000 women worldwide have undergone genetic testing. The decisions they make based on the results are usually life chang ...

We describe here a comprehensive and reliable assay to test the functional significance of variants of unknown clinical significance (VUS) identified in the human breast cancer susceptibility gene, BRCA2. The assay is based on the ability of human BRCA2 to complement the loss of endogenous ...

Hereditary nonpolyposis colorectal cancer syndrome (HNPCC) is primarily due to heterozygous germline mutations in one of the mismatch repair (MMR) genes. Mutation screening for MMR genes with various techniques revealed that the majority of mutations identified are small DNA var ...