BACKGROUND Ovarian cancer is generally diagnosed at an advanced stage where the case/fatality ratio is high and thus remains the most lethal of all gynecologic malignancies among US women. Serous tumors are the most widespread forms of ovarian cancer and the Tg-MISIIR-TAg transgenic represents the only mouse model that spontaneously develops this type of tumors. Tg-MISIIR-TAg mice express SV40 ...

Serous cystadenomas are rare tumors comprising 1-2% of exocrine pancreas tumors. They are mostly known as benign conditions but malign transformation as serous cystadenocarcinoma is also reported. It is usually seen in females. Non-specific symptoms, such as abdominal pain or symptoms due to mass affect, are usually seen. A 64-year old female patient was investigated for abdominal pain. Physica...

Loss of heterozygosity of chromosome lOq has been reported in ap proximately 40% of endometrial carcinomas. PTEN, a candidate tumor suppressor gene located at chromosome 10q23.3, was recently identified and found to be homozygously deleted or mutated In several different types of human tumors. To determine If PTEN is a target of lOq loss of heterozygosity in carcinomas of the endometrium, we ex...

Placenta-specific protein 1 (PLAC1) expression is co-opted in numerous human cancers. As a consequence of PLAC1 expression, tumor cells exhibit enhanced proliferation and invasiveness. This characteristic is associated with increased aggressiveness and worse patient outcomes. Recently, the presence of the tumor suppressor p53 was shown in vitro to inhibit PLAC1 transcription by compromising the...

The study assessed p53 and p16 immunoexpression in 20 cases of ovarian serous carcinomas and four cases of serous borderline tumors, the results being statistically analyzed in relation to clinicopathological data of the cases. The p53 immunoreaction was observed in 85% of cases, the medium percentage of positivity being 15% for borderline tumors, 45% for low-grade carcinomas and 60% for high-g...

OBJECTIVE Serous papillary carcinomas of the endometrium are aggressive tumors that tend to permeate, in a very extensive fashion, to uterine and adnexal lymphatic and vascular channels at an early stage in their evolution, and are associated with a particularly gloomy prognosis. It is generally thought that even tumors apparently limited to the endometrium or confined to an endometrial polyp h...

Metastasis is the main cause of cancer mortality. One of the initiating events of cancer metastasis of epithelial tumors is epithelial-to-mesenchymal transition (EMT), during which cells dedifferentiate from a relatively rigid cell structure/morphology to a flexible and changeable structure/morphology often associated with mesenchymal cells. The presence of EMT in human epithelial tumors is ref...

BACKGROUND Hypothalamic GH-releasing hormone (GHRH) regulates GH release from the pituitary, but an ectopic production of GHRH has been detected in various non-hypothalamic tissues, especially cancers. OBJECTIVE To investigate whether endometrial tumors produce GHRH. METHODS Twenty-four endometrioid, three serous papillary (SP), three mixed type endometrioid/serous papillary adenocarcinomas...

BACKGROUND MicroRNAs (miRNA) are 20 approximately 25 nucleotide non-coding RNAs that inhibit the translation of targeted mRNA, and they have been implicated in the development of human malignancies. High grade serous ovarian carcinomas, the most common and lethal subtype of ovarian cancer, can occur sporadically or in the setting of BRCA1/2 syndromes. Little is known regarding the miRNA express...