Levofloxacin-induced Psychosis in a Young Healthy Patient.

Levofloxacin is a fluoroquinolone antibiotic commonly used to treat a wide range of bacterial infections. It is normally well tolerated with the most common side effect being gastrointestinal distress. Severe side effects including neuropsychiatric symptoms are rare but have been observed even in patients who lack risk factors or are otherwise healthy.

Using MKK4's metastasis suppressor function to identify and dissect cancer cell-microenvironment interactions during metastatic colonization.

Host tissue microenvironment plays key roles in cancer progression and colonization of secondary organs. One example is ovarian cancer, which colonizes the peritoneal cavity and especially the omentum. Our research indicates that the interaction of ovarian cancer cells with the omental microenvironment can activate a stress-kinase pathway involving the mitogen-activated protein kinase kinase 4 (MKK4).

Building on the foundation of daring hypotheses: using the MKK4 metastasis suppressor to develop models of dormancy and metastatic colonization.

The identification of a novel metastasis suppressor function for the MAP Kinase Kinase 4 protein established a role for the stress-activated kinases in regulating the growth of disseminated cancer cells. In this review, we describe MKK4's biological mechanism of action and how this information is being used to guide the development of new models to study cancer cell dormancy and metastatic colonization. Specifically, we describe the novel application of microvolume structures, which can be modified to represent characteristics similar to those that cancer cells experience at metastatic sites.

Disrupting ovarian cancer metastatic colonization: insights from metastasis suppressor studies.

Ovarian cancer affects approximately 25,000 women in the United States each year and remains one of the most lethal female malignancies. A standard approach to therapy is surgical cytoreduction, after which the remaining microscopic residual disease is treated with chemotherapy. The vast majority of patients have disease recurrence, underscoring the crucial need for approaches to control the regrowth, or colonization, of tissues after local treatment.

In vitro metastatic colonization of human ovarian cancer cells to the omentum.

Despite the potentially crucial contributions of the omentum in the regulation of ovarian cancer metastatic growth, it remains a poorly understood organ. Due to its anatomic location and structural fragility, the omentum presents inherent challenges to mechanism-based in vivo studies. Thus, the availability of an ex vivo omental model would, in part, address some of these difficulties posed.