A major objective of current cancer research is to develop a detailed molecular characterization of tumor cells and tissues that is linked to clinical information. Toward this end, we have identified approximately one-quarter of all genes that were aberrantly expressed in a breast cancer cell line using differential display. The cancer cells lost the expression of many genes involved in cell ad...

BACKGROUND Not all patients with locally advanced rectal cancer (LARC) respond equally to neo-adjuvant radiochemotherapy (RCT). Patients with highly apoptotic less advanced rectal cancers do not benefit from short-term radiotherapy. This study investigates whether this is also the case in the setting of RCT for LARC. PATIENTS AND METHODS Tissue microarrays were constructed of biopsy and resec...

The incidence and prognostic relevance of bone marrow (BM) and leukapheresis (PBPC) tumor cell contamination (TCC) in breast cancer patients is still to be circumstantiated. We developed a new comprehensive gene expression panel to study cytokeratins (CK), maspin (MAS) and mammaglobin (MAM) as possible predictors of prognosis. Forty-eight patients undergoing high dose chemotherapy (HDCT) and PB...

BACKGROUND Combining primary surgery with postoperative radiotherapy (RT) significantly reduces locoregional recurrence rates in selected patients with laryngeal squamous cell carcinoma (SCC). A prognostic model was used to see if associating laryngeal SCC tissue markers (mammary serine protease inhibitor [MASPIN], CD105, angiogenin [ANG], and nm23-H1) with conventional criteria could better di...

“O h,...you mean if you want to change the amino acid from an arginine to an alanine, you just change the code in that position.” This “aha moment” recently happened for a member of the Brown Deer High School SMART (Students Modeling a Research Topic) Team at a Saturday morning meeting while awaiting the arrival of their scientist mentor. This student had just realized that the process used by ...