Current Pharmaceutical Biotechnology - Volume 8, Issue 2, 2007

Despite many advances in the management of cancer, a substantial portion of cancer patients will still suffer a relapse. Drug-resistance remains a major problem in dealing with malignant tumors, both in children and adults. The molecular events related to this resistant phenotype are far from being fully understood. For many pediatric tumors, molecular assays are starting to give insights about the complex relationship betwee Read More

Therapy results in childhood AML differ from those of ALL. The development of drug resistance is the limiting factor in the therapy of AML. Different problems of drug resistance in childhood AML, with emphasis to age and in comparison to adult AML are presented. In vitro and in vivo aspects are discussed, together with mechanisms of resistance to cytostatic drugs, focused on clinical relevance of cellular drug resistance profile a Read More

Myelodysplastic syndrome is a clonal hematopoietic stem cell disorder that presents a poor survival for patients treated with standard therapies other than stem-cell transplantation. Multi-drug resistance (MDR) to simultaneous drugs used in chemotherapy is a major concern in the treatment of cancer and also in MDS. ATP-binding cassette (ABC) transporters are involved in the main mechanism that confers drug resistance to Read More

Recent advances in genomic and proteomic technologies have revolutionized our way of classifying cancers. These high-throughput technologies allow the use of powerful and multivariate bioinformatic approaches to develop molecular classifiers. These classifiers can then be used to distinguish different types of tumors based on their molecular profiles. This is particularly important for heterogeneous groups of tumors Read More

Treatment results of human hepatoblastoma (HB) have been improved remarkably during recent years, mainly through the establishment of integrated regimens controlled and coordinated by multicentric treatment studies. Today, neoadjuvant and adjuvant chemotherapy is combined with surgical resection of the tumors. The main therapeutic goal is a complete surgical removal of tumor masses, which is also essential Read More

Renal cancers are as one of the most common drug resistant neoplasms affecting children and multidrug resistance (MDR) happened to be an important reason for the failure of chemotherapy in refractory cancers of childhood. MDR can be intrinsic or acquired, depending on the time of its occurrence, either at diagnosis or during chemotherapy. Renal cancers often have intrinsic form of MDR because of de novo expression Read More

The advances in the cure rates observed in the oncology field in the past decades were not fully assembled by primary brain tumors. In this heterogeneous group of diseases, resistance to either chemotherapy or radiotherapy still is a major problem to be addressed. Several genetic and epigenetic events may directly influence the response to treatment in these tumors. Throughout recent discoveries, drug resistance in b Read More