Clinical and dosimetric evaluation of recurrent breast cancer patients treated with hyperthermia and radiation.

Treatment for locally recurrent breast cancer poses a significant challenge because the benefits in local control must be weighed against the increased risk of side effects of the treatment. Frequently, patients have been heavily pre-treated with radiation and several types of chemotherapy. Moreover, they often present with large volumes of bulky disease, further complicating management.

CD55 regulates self-renewal and cisplatin resistance in endometrioid tumors.

Effective targeting of cancer stem cells (CSCs) requires neutralization of self-renewal and chemoresistance, but these phenotypes are often regulated by distinct molecular mechanisms. Here we report the ability to target both of these phenotypes via CD55, an intrinsic cell surface complement inhibitor, which was identified in a comparative analysis between CSCs and non-CSCs in endometrioid cancer models. In this context, CD55 functions in a complement-independent manner and required lipid raft localization for CSC maintenance and cisplatin resistance.

Cisplatin induces stemness in ovarian cancer.

The mainstay of treatment for ovarian cancer is platinum-based cytotoxic chemotherapy. However, therapeutic resistance and recurrence is a common eventuality for nearly all ovarian cancer patients, resulting in poor median survival. Recurrence is postulated to be driven by a population of self-renewing, therapeutically resistant cancer stem cells (CSCs).