前沿科技及其它

Animal models are crucial to further our understanding of tumor biology. For many years, observation chambers, implanted in various animal species, have been used for intravital microscopy of tumor microcirculation. As far back as 1943, Algire described the adaptation of the transpare ...

The prognosis of patients with advanced liver tumors is very poor, regardless of current treatment schedules based on surgery and/or chemotherapy. Anti-angiogenic therapy represents one of the most promising target-oriented therapeutic approaches. However, because of organ- ...

The pathogenesis of cancer dissemination and metastasis involves a cascade of interdependent events (1). These are regulated by complex host-tumor cell interaction mechanisms, such as cancer cell adhesion to endothelium and extracellular matrix, cancer cell migration and inva ...

The malignant potential of many cancers is characterized by the rate of metastsis. Metastasis is a multistep process that in general requires detachment from the original tissue, migration through the vascular endothelium, circulation in the blood, attachment to the inner blood vessel ...

The epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) family consists of four closely related transmembrane receptors including the EGFR (erbB1), erbB2 (HER2), erbB3 (HER3), and erbB4 (HER4). EGFR (erbB1) was the first member to be described and sequenced (1). The EGFR is a 170 kDa plasma membrane glycopr ...

As a result of early reports indicating that farnesylation was required for maturation of Ras proteins, there has been extensive interest in farnesyl-transferase (FT) as a potential target of antineoplastic therapy (1–3). At the present time, three different FT inhibitors (FTIs), SCH66 ...

The molecular chaperone HSP90 is currently under investigation as a promising target for anticancer drug discovery. It constitutes 1–2% of total cellular protein and is present in the cell as a dimer in association with a number of other proteins (1). HSP90 is involved in ensuring adequate prote ...

The ubiquitin-proteasome pathway has an essential role in the regulation of numerous cellular proteins, including those mediating inflammatory conditions and cancer (1–6). Intracellular proteins destined for proteolysis are first tagged with polyubiquitin chains throu ...

The two-hybrid assay was described in 1989 as a method to determine protein-protein interactions in living cells (1). The principle of the assay relies on the fact that the DNA binding and transactivation domains are separable and can operate in heterologous contexts in most transcription fa ...

During the past several years, remarkable progress has been made in solving the structures of high molecular weight proteins using X-ray crystallography and multidimensional nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy. As the structures of more proteins are being routinely so ...

Antisense therapy represents a novel genetic-based therapeutic approach, initiated by Zamecnik et al. about 20 years ago (1). The rationale for antisense oligonucleotide therapeutics is straightforward: to identify a specific inhibitor of an mRNA of interest on the basis of the nucleo ...

New methods have been developed for determining and monitoring gene expression levels during pathologic or therapeutic processes. In particular, nucleic acid microarrays provide information about the expression levels of thousands of genes during a single experiment. Advan ...

Nanogram quantities of DNA circulating in blood are present in healthy subjects (1,2). A number of recent studies have shown that tumor DNA is shed in either plasma or serum of cancer patients (3–11). Further, the plasma of cancer patients is enriched in DNA, up to four times the amount of free DNA compared to pl ...

In vitro anticancer drug testing is routinely performed on cell lines established from various types of malignant tumors. The use of these cell models has proved effective in determining the worthiness of potential drugs for further testing at the clinical level. They provide a system in which a ...

Malignant and reactive lymphoproliferations in most cases can be distinguished by histology and immunohistology alone; however, in T-cell lymphoproliferations and lymphoproliferations of unknown origin, histology often is inconclusive, and there is no reliable protein m ...

The germinal center plays an important role in the pathogenesis of B-cell lymphomas, and evidence exists to suggest that most cases are germinal center or postgerminal center derived. Burkitt lymphoma and follicular lymphoma are derived from the germinal center stage of differentiat ...

Marginal zone (MZ) or MZ-like B-cells “home” outside the follicles of peripheral lymphoid tissues. Prototypic examples of these B-cells are those that home the MZ of the spleen, although B-cells with similar phenotypic and functional features can be found in the subepithelial (SE) areas of ton ...

Beyond the morphological, immunophenotypic, and genetic information used for the diagnosis of lymphoid malignancies, molecular analyses have deepened our insights into the development of B-cell lymphomas. We have learned that B-cell tumors can be grouped according to the mutatio ...

Serological analysis of recombinant complementary deoxyribonucleic acid (cDNA) expression libraries (SEREX) is a powerful approach to identify immunogenic cancer-associated proteins using antibodies that are naturally present in the serum of cancer patients. This tech ...

Culture and transport methods are described that allow chromosomes to be obtained from lymph node biopsies with a high success rate, even when the biopsy is taken at a distant site from the cytogenetic laboratory. Optimal banding techniques for the identification of these chromosomes are gi ...