PURPOSE Wilms' tumor is a childhood cancer of the kidney with an incidence of approximately 1 in 10,000. Cooccurrence of Wilms' tumor with 2q37 deletion syndrome, an uncommon constitutional chromosome abnormality, has been reported previously in three children. Given these are independently rare clinical entities, we hypothesized that 2q37 harbors a tumor suppressor gene important in Wilms' tum...

BACKGROUND Pigmented lesions are common, yet they present diagnostic and therapeutic challenges. They range from nevi, which are clinically stable, to melanomas, which are notorious for distant metastasis and death. Both nevi and melanomas arise from melanocytes, which are neural crest derivatives, and melanocyte precursors migrate from the paraspinal area to their eventual location at the derm...

IntroductIon Nephrogenic rests (NRs) are abnormally persistent clusters of embryonal cells, representing microscopic dysplasias of the developing kidney. NRs are found in approximately 1% of infant kidneys at autopsy. Nephroblastomatosis signifies the presence of multiple or diffuse NRs. Both NRs and nephroblastomatosis were known as precursor lesions of Wilms’ tumor.[1] Nephroblastomatosis can...

Wilms tumor is the most common childhood renal tumor accounting for about 6% of pediatric malignant disease. Most patients with Wilms tumor can be cured with treatment and subsequently lead normal life. The multidisciplinary management of Wilms tumor has resulted striking improvement in survival of more than 85% nowadays and has become a paradigm for successful cancer therapy. We describe the r...

Objective(s): Herbal medicines are promising cancer preventive candidates. It has been shown that Punica granatum L. could inhibit angiogenesis and tumor invasion. In this study, we investigated whether the anti-angiogenic effect of pomegranate peel extract (PPE) is partly attributable to Peroxisome proliferator-activated receptors (PPARs) activation in the Human Umbilical Vein Endothelial Cell...

PURPOSE Recently, two alternatively spliced survivin variants, survivin-ΔEx3 and survivin-2B, were identified in a single copy of the survivin gene. It has been reported that the expressions of survivin splice variants significantly correlates with the clinical results in many types of human carcinoma. We investigated the transcription levels of survivin and its splice variants in human colorec...

Recently, agonist antibodies to glucocorticoid-induced tumor necrosis factor receptor (GITR) (tumor necrosis factor receptor superfamily 18) have been shown to neutralize the suppressive activity of CD4+CD25+ regulatory T cells. It was anticipated that this would be the role of the physiological ligand. We have identified and expressed the gene for mouse GITR ligand and have confirmed that its ...

Treatment of Wilms tumor has a high success rate, with some 85% of patients achieving long-term survival. However, late effects of treatment and management of relapse remain significant clinical problems. If accurate prognostic methods were available, effective risk-adapted therapies could be tailored to individual patients at diagnosis. Few molecular prognostic markers for Wilms tumor are curr...

The Wilms' tumor suppressor gene WT1 encodes a zinc finger transcription factor, whose expression inhibits the growth of the RM1 Wilms' tumor cell line. Transient transfection of WT1 constructs into 3T3 or 293 cells results in transcriptional repression of a number of cotransfected promoters containing the early growth response gene 1 consensus sequence. We now show that WT1 has properties of a...