545 results match your criteria: "Cancer Research Institute Ghent CRIG[Affiliation]"

Objectives: Pseudomyxoma peritonei (PMP) is a rare cancer currently affecting over 11,736 patients across Europe. Since PMP is so uncommon, collaboration between scientific centers is key to discovering the mechanisms behind the disease, efficient treatments, and targets pointing to a cure. To date, no consensus has been reached on the minimum data that should be collected during PMP research studies.

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Skin cancer is known to be a significant health care threat due to the massively increasing numbers of diagnoses. In 2019, 4 million basal cell carcinoma (BCC) cases were diagnosed globally, making BCC the most frequent of all cancers worldwide in fair skinned populations. Given the increasing life-expectancy for all countries worldwide (by 2050, the world's population of people aged 60 years and older will have doubled), the incidence of BCC is expected to keep increasing in the future.

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Building a Human Physiologically Based Pharmacokinetic Model for Aflatoxin B1 to Simulate Interactions with Drugs.

Pharmaceutics

March 2023

Laboratory of Medical Biochemistry and Clinical Analysis, Department of Bioanalysis, Ghent University, 9000 Ghent, Belgium.

Mycotoxins such as aflatoxin B1 (AFB1) are secondary fungal metabolites present in food commodities and part of one's daily exposure, especially in certain regions, e.g., sub-Saharan Africa.

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Randomized controlled trials and alternative study designs in surgical oncology.

Eur J Surg Oncol

August 2023

Department of Gastrointestinal Surgery, Stavanger University Hospital, Stavanger, Norway; Department of Clinical Medicine, University of Bergen, Bergen, Norway; SAFER Surgery, Surgical Research Unit, Stavanger University Hospital, Stavanger, Norway. Electronic address:

Surgery is central to the cure of most solid cancers and an integral part of modern multimodal cancer management for early and advanced stage cancers. Decisions made by surgeons and multidisciplinary team members are based on best available knowledge for the defined clinical situation at hand. While surgery is both an art and a science, good decision-making requires data that are robust, valid, representative and, applicable to most if not all patients with a specific cancer.

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Continuous freeze-drying of messenger RNA lipid nanoparticles enables storage at higher temperatures.

J Control Release

May 2023

Laboratory of General Biochemistry and Physical Pharmacy, Faculty of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Ghent University, Ghent 9000, Belgium.; Cancer Research Institute Ghent (CRIG), Ghent University Hospital, Ghent University, Ghent 9000, Belgium. Electronic address:

Messenger RNA (mRNA) lipid nanoparticles (LNPs) have emerged at the forefront during the COVID-19 vaccination campaign. Despite their tremendous success, mRNA vaccines currently require storage at deep freeze temperatures which complicates their storage and distribution, and ultimately leads to lower accessibility to low- and middle-income countries. To elaborate on this challenge, we investigated freeze-drying as a method to enable storage of mRNA LNPs at room- and even higher temperatures.

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Accuracy and transparency of scientific data are becoming more and more relevant with the increasing concern regarding the evaluation of data reproducibility in many research areas. This concern is also true for quantifying coding and noncoding RNAs, with the remarkable increase in publications reporting RNA profiling and sequencing studies. To address the problem, we propose the following recommendations: (a) accurate documentation of experimental procedures in Materials and methods (and not only in the supplementary information, as many journals have a strict mandate for making Materials and methods as visible as possible in the main text); (b) submission of RT-qPCR raw data for all experiments reported; and (c) adoption of a unified, simple format for submitted RT-qPCR raw data.

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Background: Chemoradiotherapy (CRT) followed by brachytherapy (BT) is the standard treatment for locally advanced cervical cancer (LACC), but replacement of BT by surgery (CRT-S) could be an acceptable alternative. The main concern is the risk of operative morbidity. The aim is to report on therapeutic morbidity, OS, PC, and LC of CRT-S.

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The pediatric extra-cranial tumor neuroblastoma displays a low mutational burden while recurrent copy number alterations are present in most high-risk cases. Here, we identify SOX11 as a dependency transcription factor in adrenergic neuroblastoma based on recurrent chromosome 2p focal gains and amplifications, specific expression in the normal sympatho-adrenal lineage and adrenergic neuroblastoma, regulation by multiple adrenergic specific (super-)enhancers and strong dependency on high SOX11 expression in adrenergic neuroblastomas. SOX11 regulated direct targets include genes implicated in epigenetic control, cytoskeleton and neurodevelopment.

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Perillaldehyde is a new ferroptosis inducer with a relevant clinical potential for acute myeloid leukemia therapy.

Biomed Pharmacother

October 2022

Department for Life Quality Studies, University of Bologna, C.so d'Augusto 237, 47921 Rimini, Italy. Electronic address:

Ferroptosis induction is an emerging strategy to treat cancer and contrast the tricky issue of chemoresistance, which can arise towards apoptosis. This work elucidates the anticancer mechanisms evoked by perillaldehyde, a monoterpenoid isolated from Ammodaucus leucotrichus Coss. & Dur.

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Although hematologic malignancies (HM) are no longer considered exclusively sporadic, additional awareness of familial cases has yet to be created. Individuals carrying a (likely) pathogenic germline variant (e.g.

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A role for partial epithelial-to-mesenchymal transition in enabling stemness in homeostasis and cancer.

Semin Cancer Biol

May 2023

Molecular and Cellular Oncology Laboratory, Department of Biomedical Molecular Biology, Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium; Cancer Research Institute Ghent (CRIG), Ghent, Belgium. Electronic address:

Stem cells have self-renewal capacities and the ability to give rise to differentiated cells thereby sustaining tissues during homeostasis and injury. This structural hierarchy extends to tumours which harbor stem-like cells deemed cancer stem cells that propagate the tumour and drive metastasis and relapse. The process of epithelial-to-mesenchymal transition (EMT), which plays an important role in development and cancer cell migration, was shown to be correlated with stemness in both homeostasis and cancer indicating that stemness can be acquired and is not necessarily an intrinsic trait.

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Pre-Clinical Evaluation of the Hypomethylating Agent Decitabine for the Treatment of T-Cell Lymphoblastic Lymphoma.

Cancers (Basel)

January 2023

Normal and Malignant Hematopoiesis Laboratory, Department of Biomolecular Medicine, Ghent University, 9000 Ghent, Belgium.

T-cell lymphoblastic lymphoma (T-LBL) is a rare and aggressive lymphatic cancer, often diagnosed at a young age. Patients are treated with intensive chemotherapy, potentially followed by a hematopoietic stem cell transplantation. Although prognosis of T-LBL has improved with intensified treatment protocols, they are associated with side effects and 10-20% of patients still die from relapsed or refractory disease.

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Background: Multiple treatments are available for metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer (mCRPC), including androgen receptor signaling inhibitors (ARSI) enzalutamide and abiraterone, but therapy resistance remains a major clinical obstacle. We examined the clinical utility of low-pass whole-genome sequencing (LPWGS) of circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA) for prognostication in mCRPC.

Methods: A total of 200 plasma samples from 143 mCRPC patients collected at the start of first-line ARSI treatment (baseline) and at treatment termination (n = 57, matched) were analyzed by LPWGS (median: 0.

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Impact of the polymer backbone chemistry on interactions of amino-acid-derived zwitterionic polymers with cells.

Bioact Mater

June 2023

Supramolecular Chemistry Group, Centre of Macromolecular Chemistry (CMaC), Department of Organic and Macromolecular Chemistry, Ghent University, Krijgslaan 281 S4, B-9000, Ghent, Belgium.

Zwitterionic polymers are known to interact with cells and have been shown to reveal cancer cell specificity. In this work, the importance of the chemistry of the polymer backbone for the cellular specificity of amino-acid-derived polyzwitterions is demonstrated. A series of glutamic acid (Glu)-based vinyl monomers (, an acrylate, a methacrylate, an acrylamide, and a methacrylamide) were prepared and used for reversible addition-fragmentation chain-transfer (RAFT) polymerisation, yielding defined polymers with narrow size distribution (Р< 1.

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In vitro cell culture experiments are widely used to study cellular behavior in most biological research fields. Except for suspension cells, most human cell types are cultured as adherent monolayers on a plastic surface. While technically convenient, monolayer cultures can suffer from limitations in terms of physiological relevance, as their resemblance to complex in vivo tissue structures is limited.

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Accurate assessment of treatment response and residual disease is indispensable for the evaluation of cancer treatment efficacy. However, performing tissue biopsies for longitudinal follow-up poses a major challenge in the management of solid tumours like neuroblastoma. In the present study, we evaluated whether circulating miRNAs are suitable to monitor neuroblastoma tumour burden and whether treatment-induced changes of miRNA abundance in the tumour are detectable in serum.

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Circular RNAs (circRNAs) are emerging as new players in leukemogenic mechanisms. In patients with T-cell Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia (T-ALL), the recent report of a remarkable dysregulation of circRNAs incited further functional investigation. Here we focus on circFBXW7, highly expressed in T-cells, with a notably high abundance of the circular compared to linear transcript of FBXW7.

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Background: Blood plasma, one of the most studied liquid biopsies, contains various molecules that have biomarker potential for cancer detection, including cell-free DNA (cfDNA) and cell-free RNA (cfRNA). As the vast majority of cell-free nucleic acids in circulation are non-cancerous, a laboratory workflow with a high detection sensitivity of tumor-derived nucleic acids is a prerequisite for precision oncology. One way to meet this requirement is by the combined analysis of cfDNA and cfRNA from the same liquid biopsy sample.

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Background: Omentoplasty is a commonly performed procedure after abdominoperineal resection for rectal cancer, but its effectiveness to reduce pelviperineal complications is not firmly established.

Objective: This study aimed to assess the impact of omentoplasty on postoperative outcomes after long-course (chemo) radiotherapy and abdominoperineal resection in patients with locally advanced and locally recurrent rectal cancer.

Design: Retrospective cohort study.

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Background: Cyclin E1 (CCNE1) is a potential predictive marker and therapeutic target in tubo-ovarian high-grade serous carcinoma (HGSC). Smaller studies have revealed unfavorable associations for CCNE1 amplification and CCNE1 overexpression with survival, but to date no large-scale, histotype-specific validation has been performed. The hypothesis was that high-level amplification of CCNE1 and CCNE1 overexpression, as well as a combination of the two, are linked to shorter overall survival in HGSC.

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Targeted AURKA degradation: Towards new therapeutic agents for neuroblastoma.

Eur J Med Chem

February 2023

Department of Biomolecular Medicine, Faculty of Medicine & Health Sciences, Ghent University, Belgium; Cancer Research Institute Ghent (CRIG), Ghent, Belgium. Electronic address:

Aurora kinase A (AURKA) is a well-established target in neuroblastoma (NB) due to both its catalytic functions during mitosis and its kinase-independent functions, including stabilization of the key oncoprotein MYCN. We present a structure-activity relationship (SAR) study of MK-5108-derived PROTACs against AURKA by exploring different linker lengths and exit vectors on the thalidomide moiety. PROTAC SK2188 induces the most potent AURKA degradation (DC 3.

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IRF2 is required for development and functional maturation of human NK cells.

Front Immunol

December 2022

Laboratory of Experimental Immunology, Department of Diagnostic Sciences, Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium.

Natural killer (NK) cells are cytotoxic and cytokine-producing lymphocytes that play an important role in the first line of defense against malignant or virus-infected cells. A better understanding of the transcriptional regulation of human NK cell differentiation is crucial to improve the efficacy of NK cell-mediated immunotherapy for cancer treatment. Here, we studied the role of the transcription factor interferon regulatory factor (IRF) 2 in human NK cell differentiation by stable knockdown or overexpression in cord blood hematopoietic stem cells and investigated its effect on development and function of the NK cell progeny.

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Background: How molecular profiles are associated with tumor microenvironment (TME) in high-grade serous ovarian cancer (HGSOC) is incompletely understood. Therefore, we analyzed the TME and molecular profiles of HGSOC and assessed their associations with overall survival (OS).

Methods: Patients with advanced-stage HGSOC treated in three Dutch hospitals between 2008-2015 were included.

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Dysregulation of kinase signaling pathways favors tumor cell survival and therapy resistance in cancer. Here, we reveal a posttranslational regulation of kinase signaling and nuclear receptor activity via deubiquitination in T cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia (T-ALL). We observed that the ubiquitin-specific protease 11 (USP11) is highly expressed and associates with poor prognosis in T-ALL.

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