Reducing prolonged chemoradiation treatment times for cervical cancer.

Prolonged total treatment times (TTTs) beyond 56 days are associated with worse outcomes for cervical cancer treated with radiation therapy. We reviewed treatment times in a cohort of 24 consecutive patients treated with definitive chemoradiation (CRT) at our institution and found that only 14 patients (58.3%) completed treatment in less than or equal to 56 days.

Lack of vascular endothelial growth factor receptor-2/Flk1 signaling does not affect substantia nigra development.

Oxygen tension is critical for proliferation of human and murine midbrain-derived neural precursor cells (mNPCs). Lack of hypoxia-inducible factor-1α (HIF1α) impairs midbrain dopaminergic neurogenesis which could be rescued by vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) via VEGFR-2 signaling. Here, we conditionally inactivated the VEGFR-2, encoded by the fetal liver kinase 1 (Flk1) gene, in murine NPCs to determine its role in proliferation and survival in vitro as well as survival of dopaminergic neurons in vivo.