Retinoblastoma is the most common primary intraocular malignancy of infancy and childhood with an incidence of 1 in every 20,000 live births.1 During the 20th century, retinoblastoma was uniformly fatal. Early diagnosis and recent advances in the management of retinoblastoma particularly the use of chemo-therapy have improved the prognosis of this fatal disease. Although this neoplasm has one o...

Culturing retinoblastoma tumor cells in defined stem cell media gives rise to primary tumorspheres that can be grown and maintained for only a limited time. These cultured tumorspheres may exhibit markedly different cellular phenotypes when compared to the original tumors. Demonstration that cultured cells have the capability of forming new tumors is important to ensure that cultured cells mode...

BACKGROUND The expression of CD24 has been detected in a wide variety of human malignancies. Downregulation of CD24 inhibits proliferation and induces apoptosis in tumor cells, whereas its upregulation increases tumor growth and metastasis. However, no data on CD24 protein levels in retinoblastoma are available, and the mechanism of CD24 involvement in retinoblastoma progress has not been eluci...

AIM To evaluate until what age children in families with retinoblastoma should be screened. METHODS A register based cohort (n= 685) study of Dutch retinoblastoma patients (1945-1998). The records of all familial hereditary retinoblastoma patients from 1945 were reviewed and the age at diagnosis and either they were screened from birth determined. RESULTS 75 patients had the familial heredi...

AIMS This study aimed to examine the expression of Sonic hedgehog (SHH) signalling proteins in retinoblastoma and to evaluate its clinical significance. METHODS Seventy-nine enucleated retinoblastoma tumours were investigated immunohistochemically using antibodies against SHH pathway proteins, such as SHH, glioma-associated oncogene homologue (GLI) 1, GLI2, GLI3 and ABC binding cassette G2 (A...

Vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) is a major regulator in retinal and choroidal angiogenesis, which are common causes of blindness in all age groups. Recently anti-VEGF treatment using anti-VEGF antibody has revolutionarily improved the visual outcome in patients with vaso-proliferative retinopathies. Herein, we demonstrated that bevacizumab as an anti-VEGF antibody could inhibit differ...

Actas Dermosifiliogr. 2009;100:615-34 626 some forms of brain tumor; although such outcomes have not been demonstrated for melanoma. The cells of retinoblastoma, melanoma and dysplastic nevus are derived from the neural crest. There are authors who postulate that patients with retinoblastoma and dysplastic nevus syndrome have increased genetic susceptibility to melanoma due to a primary anomaly...

The role of estimating the serum carcinoembryonic antigen (CEA) in the diagnosis and prognosis of retinoblastoma cases has been evaluated. Although the mean serum CEA titre in children with retinoblastoma was higher than that in control children (p = 0.01), the serum CEA level itself was found not to be a useful marker in the diagnosis of retinoblastoma. A significant correlation of serum CEA t...

Studies on retinoblastoma have been at the heart of many of the landmark discoveries in cancer genetics over the past 35 years. However, these advances in the laboratory have had little effect on the treatment of children with retinoblastoma. One of the reasons for this has been the lack of preclinical models that recapitulated the genetic and histopathologic features of human retinoblastoma. I...

The cell cycle regulator, retinoblastoma protein, is known to potentiate glucocorticoid receptor-activated transcription through the interaction of its pocket domain with the transcription coactivator, hBRM. We now show that glucocorticoid receptor-induced apoptosis is also dependent on both the retinoblastoma protein and hBRM. p107 and p130, which share extensive sequence homology with the poc...