[The accreditation of a surgical pathology and somatic genetic laboratory (LPCE, CHU of Nice) according to the ISO 15189 norm: Sharing of experience].

Accreditation is going to be vital and unavoidable in the medium term for medical biology laboratories in France. This accreditation will certainly condition the authorization to conduct biological testing in the health care system. All the biological specialities are now affected by this procedure, including the somatic genetics.

[What is new in 2010 for electron microscopy in surgical pathology?].

In the last decades, several ancillary methods, such as immunohistochemistry and molecular biology techniques, have increased the possibilities for the diagnosis and to evaluate the prognosis of lesions observed in a laboratory of pathology. Conversely, the impact of another method largely used a couple of years ago in a laboratory of pathology, the electron microscopy (EM), is currently limited. EM is a difficult, quite expensive and long method, which requires technicians with a high qualification.

[Role of the surgical pathology laboratory in the pre-analytical approach of molecular biology techniques].

The advent of the targeted cancer therapies administered to patients, according to the results of molecular biology techniques (in particular, in situ hybridization, "polymerase chain reaction" amplification and sequencing), has modified the practice of the surgical pathology laboratories. The necessity to answer to the needs of physicians for optimizing the medical care for patients who develop cancer has led to a policy of national debate, spurred by the National Institute of Cancer (INCa), in order to implement new procedures in the pathology laboratories. Thus, in addition to the structuring of molecular biology platforms and their labeling by INCa, the upstream control of the steps present between resection of tumor samples and molecular analysis has proved to be crucial.

Candidate mechanisms for capecitabine-related hand-foot syndrome.

Aims: The oral fluoropyrimidine prodrug capecitabine is widely used in oncology. Capecitabine was designed to generate 5FU via the thymidine phosphorylase (TP) enzyme, preferentially expressed in tumoral tissues. Hand-foot syndrome (HFS) is a limiting toxicity of capecitabine.

Control of the autophagy maturation step by the MAPK ERK and p38: lessons from environmental carcinogens.

Macroautophagy (hereafter referred to as autophagy) is the major degradative pathway of long-lived proteins and organelles that fulfils key functions in cell survival, tissue remodeling and tumor suppression. Consistently, alterations in autophagy have been involved in a growing list of pathologies including toxic injury, infections, neurodegeneration, myopathies and cancers. Although critical, the molecular mechanisms that control autophagy remain largely unknown.

[Antiretroviral treatments-related lipodystrophy syndrome: clinico-pathological findings].

Effective therapies are available that can stop or slow down the progression of HIV infection. Highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART) is a combination of antiretroviral drugs such as viral protease inhibitors or nucleoside-analogue reverse-transcriptase inhibitors. Among the side effects due to these drugs, lipodystrophy is a pathology characterized by fat wasting in face and limbs, accumulation of visceral fat, breast adiposity, cervical fat-pads, hyperlipidemia (hypertriglyceridemia and hypercholesterolemia), insulin resistance, and lactic acidemia.