Gliomas are the most common primary brain tumours in humans and are associated with a poor prognosis. An accurate animal model of human glioma tumorigenesis is needed to test new treatment strategies. Dogs represent a promising model because they develop spontaneous diffusely-infiltrating gliomas. This study investigated whether spontaneous canine gliomas contain cancer stem cells previously id...

NDRG1 is a member of the N-myc downregulated gene (NDRG) family. Its induction occurs via diverse physiological and pathological conditions (hypoxia, cellular differentiation, heavy metal, N-myc, neoplasia) which modulate NDRG1 transcription, mRNA stability and translation. Hypoxia, among other factors, induces NDRG1 expression and plays an important role in its regulation of expression. To dat...

Elevated expression of the drug efflux transporter ABCG2 seems to correlate with multidrug resistance of cancer cells. Specific COX-2 inhibitor celecoxib has been shown to enhance the sensitivity of cancer cells to anticancer drugs. To clarify whether ABCG2 inhibition is involved in the sensitizing effect of celecoxib, we investigated whether the expression of ABCG2 in breast cancer cell lines ...

PURPOSE BRAF is frequently activated by gene fusion or point mutation in pilocytic astrocytoma, the most common pediatric brain tumor. We investigated the functional effect of constitutive BRAF activation in normal human neural stem and progenitor cells to determine its role in tumor induction in the brain. EXPERIMENTAL DESIGN The constitutively active BRAF(V600E) allele was introduced into h...

Toll-like receptor 9 (TLR9) recognizes microbial DNA. We show here that TLR9 protein is expressed in human breast cancer cells and clinical breast cancer samples. Stimulation of TLR9-expressing breast cancer cells with the TLR9 agonistic CpG oligonucleotides (1-10 mumol/L) dramatically increased their in vitro invasion in both Matrigel assays and three-dimensional collagen cultures. Similar eff...

The product of AXIN2, a component of Wnt signalling, plays a role in tumorigenesis and is dysregulated in cancer cells. In order to determine whether the AXIN2 polymorphism is a risk factor for astrocytoma, we analysed eight polymorphic regions of this gene in 100 astrocytoma patients compared to 100 healthy controls in a Turkish population using PCR-RFLP methods. For the Exon1-148 T/C, Exon1-4...

As the most common intracranial malignant neoplasms, astrocytomas are characterized by high neovascularization and severe peritumoral brain edema (PTBE). Angiogenesis is a prerequisite for the growth of solid tumors, including astrocytoma, and brain-specific angiogenesis inhibitor 1 (BAI1) is a novel angiogenesis inhibitor. In the present study, the expression levels of BAI1, vascular endotheli...