Leukemia Cutis As the Initial Manifestation of Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia Progression.

Chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) is a malignant proliferation of monoclonal mature B-cells in peripheral blood. Leukemia cells can commonly spread from the blood to other sites such as the lymph nodes, liver, and spleen. However, contrary to T-cell lymphomas that can involve the skin, CLL metastasis to the skin is unusual and is rarely the first manifestation of systemic disease.

Immunoblot Validation of Phospho-Specific Antibodies Using Lung Cancer Cell Lines.

The cancer phenotype is usually characterized by deregulated activity of a variety of cellular kinases, with consequent abnormal hyper-phosphorylation of their target proteins. Therefore, antibodies that allow the detection of phosphorylated versions of proteins have become important tools both preclinically in molecular cancer research, and at the clinical level by serving as tools in pathological analyses of tumors. In order to ensure reliable results, validation of the phospho-specificity of these antibodies is extremely important, since this ensures that they are indeed able to discriminate between the phosphorylated and unphosphorylated versions of the protein of interest, specifically recognizing the phosphorylated variant.

Hyper-phosphorylation of Rb S249 together with CDK5R2/p39 overexpression are associated with impaired cell adhesion and epithelial-to-mesenchymal transition: Implications as a potential lung cancer grading and staging biomarker.

Prediction of lung cancer metastasis relies on post-resection assessment of tumor histology, which is a severe limitation since only a minority of lung cancer patients are diagnosed with resectable disease. Therefore, characterization of metastasis-predicting biomarkers in pre-resection small biopsy specimens is urgently needed. Here we report a biomarker consisting of the phosphorylation of the retinoblastoma protein (Rb) on serine 249 combined with elevated p39 expression.