Unresectable carcinoma of the paranasal sinuses: outcomes and toxicities.

Purpose: To evaluate long-term outcomes and toxicity in patients with unresectable paranasal sinus carcinoma treated with radiotherapy, with or without chemotherapy.

Methods And Materials: Between January 1990 and December 2006, 39 patients with unresectable Stage IVB paranasal sinus carcinoma were treated definitively with chemotherapy plus radiotherapy (n = 35, 90%) or with radiotherapy alone (n = 4, 10%). Patients were treated with three-dimensional conformal radiotherapy (n = 18, 46%), intensity-modulated radiotherapy (n = 12, 31%), or conventional radiotherapy (n = 9, 23%) to a median treatment dose of 70 Gy.

Long-term clinical outcomes of whole-breast irradiation delivered in the prone position.

Purpose: The aim of this study was to evaluate retrospectively the effectiveness and toxicity of post-lumpectomy whole-breast radiation therapy delivered with prone positioning.

Methods And Materials: Between September 1992 and August 2004, 245 women with 248 early-stage invasive or in situ breast cancers were treated using a prone breast board. Photon fields treated the whole breast to 46 to 50.

Treatment of nasal cavity and paranasal sinus cancer with modern radiotherapy techniques in the postoperative setting--the MSKCC experience.

Purpose: To perform a retrospective analysis of patients with paranasal sinus (PNS) cancer treated with postoperative radiotherapy (RT) at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center.

Methods And Materials: Between January 1987 and July 2005, 85 patients with PNS and nasal cavity cancer underwent postoperative RT. Most patients had squamous cell carcinoma (49%; n = 42), T4 tumors (52%; n = 36), and the maxillary sinus (53%; n = 45) as the primary disease site.

Molecular imaging of gene expression and efficacy following adenoviral-mediated brain tumor gene therapy.

Cancer gene therapy is an active area of research relying upon the transfer and subsequent expression of a therapeutic transgene into tumor cells in order to provide for therapeutic selectivity. Noninvasive assessment of therapeutic response and correlation of the location, magnitude, and duration of transgene expression in vivo would be particularly useful in the development of cancer gene therapy protocols by facilitating optimization of gene transfer protocols, vector development, and prodrug dosing schedules. In this study, we developed an adenoviral vector containing both the therapeutic transgene yeast cytosine deaminase (yCD) along with an optical reporter gene (luciferase).

Evaluation of (E)-2'-deoxy-2'-(fluoromethylene)cytidine on the 9L rat brain tumor model using MRI.

(E)-2'-deoxy-2'-(fluoromethylene)cytidine (FMdC), was evaluated as a potential treatment for malignant gliomas using the rat 9L brain tumor model. FMdC was shown to be an effective inhibitor of cell proliferation in cultured 9L cells with an EC(50) of 40 ng/ml. In vitro studies also revealed that this compound significantly inhibited incorporation of [(3)H]thymidine in 9L cells.