Anaplastic thyroid cancer: outcome and the mutation/expression profiles of potential targets.

Anaplastic thyroid cancer (ATC) is a rare but aggressive malignancy of the thyroid. No effective treatment modalities are currently available. Targeted therapy against protein kinases showed promising results in preclinical studies.

Hypercalcemia from metastatic pancreatic neuroendocrine tumor secreting 1,25-dihydroxyvitamin D.

Malignant hypercalcemia occurs in about 20-30% of patients with cancer, both solid tumors and hematologic malignancies. The secretion of parathyroid hormone-related protein (PTH-rP) is the most common cause and has been shown to be the etiology of hypercalcemia associated with neuroendocrine tumors. Here we report the case of a patient with metastatic pancreatic neuroendocrine tumor who developed hypercalcemia more than 4 years after the initial diagnosis as a result of secretion of 1,25-dihydroxyvitamin D, a mechanism only commonly seen in lymphomas.

Early detection of high-grade squamous intraepithelial lesions in the cervix with quantitative spectroscopic imaging.

Quantitative spectroscopy has recently been extended from a contact-probe to wide-area spectroscopic imaging to enable mapping of optical properties across a wide area of tissue. We train quantitative spectroscopic imaging (QSI) to identify cervical high-grade squamous intraepithelial lesions (HSILs) in 34 subjects undergoing the loop electrosurgical excision procedure (LEEP subjects). QSI's performance is then prospectively evaluated on the clinically suspicious biopsy sites from 47 subjects undergoing colposcopic-directed biopsy.

Comparison of elastic scattering spectroscopy with histology in ex vivo prostate glands: potential application for optically guided biopsy and directed treatment.

The false-negative rate of ultrasound-guided sextant prostate biopsy has been estimated to be as high as 35 %. A significant percentage (10-35 %) of these prostate cancers diagnosed at a second or later attempt are high grade and, therefore, potentially lethal. We discuss the feasibility for performing optically guided biopsy using elastic scattering spectroscopy (ESS) to reduce sampling errors and improve sensitivity.

Expression of microRNA and their gene targets are dysregulated in preinvasive breast cancer.

Introduction: microRNA (miRNA) are short, noncoding RNA that negatively regulate gene expression and may play a causal role in invasive breast cancer. Since many genetic aberrations of invasive disease are detectable in early stages, we hypothesized that miRNA expression dysregulation and the predicted changes in gene expression might also be found in early breast neoplasias.

Methods: Expression profiling of 365 miRNA by real-time quantitative polymerase chain reaction assay was combined with laser capture microdissection to obtain an epithelium-specific miRNA expression signature of normal breast epithelium from reduction mammoplasty (RM) (n = 9) and of paired samples of histologically normal epithelium (HN) and ductal carcinoma in situ (DCIS) (n = 16).