BACKGROUND Recently, there have been a few reports of renal cell carcinoma (RCC) cases with anaplastic lymphoma kinase (ALK) gene fusion. In this study, we screened consecutively resected RCCs from a single institution for ALK protein expression by immunohistochemistry, and then we performed fluorescence in situ hybridization to confirm the ALK gene alteration in ALK immunohistochemistry-positi...

Recent findings intriguingly place DNA double-strand break repair proteins at chromosome ends in yeast, where they help maintain normal telomere length and structure. In the present study, an essential telomere function, the ability to cap and thereby protect chromosomes from end-to-end fusions, was assessed in repair-deficient mouse cell lines. By using fluorescence in situ hybridization with ...

BACKGROUND Molecular cytogenetics is becoming one of the most useful tools targeting some genes which are generally considered to lead to leukemic transformation (as well as for numerical abnormalities). A fraction of acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) cases carry the translocation t(9;22) (q34;q11.2) which juxtaposes the ABL proto-oncogene to the BCR gene generating a chimeric gene, BCR/ABL. T...

BACKGROUND TMPRSS2:ERG gene aberration may be a novel marker that improves risk stratification of prostate cancer before definitive cancer therapy, but studies have been inconclusive. METHODS The study cohort consisted of 202 operable prostate cancer Slovenian patients who underwent laparoscopic radical prostatectomy. We retrospectively constructed tissue microarrays of their prostatic specim...

OBJECTIVES We have analyzed t(12;21)(p13:q22) in an attempt to evaluate the frequency and prognostic significance of TEL-AML1 fusion gene in patients with childhood CD 10 positive B-ALL by fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH). Also, we have monitored the prognostic value of this gene as a minimal residual disease (MRD). METHODS All bone marrow samples of eighty patients diagnosed as CD 1...

Although common in hematologic and mesenchymal malignancies, recurrent gene fusions have not been well characterized in epithelial carcinomas. Recently, using a novel bioinformatic approach, we identified recurrent gene fusions between TMPRSS2 and the ETS family members ERG or ETV1 in the majority of prostate cancers. Here, we interrogated the expression of all ETS family members in prostate ca...

HB NEPC is an aggressive variant of prostate cancer that typically is diagnosed in the later stages of advanced disease. It is thought to arise as a function of treatment resistance.1 In its pure form, NEPC is histologically similar to other high-grade or small cell neuroendocrine carcinomas, often expressing classical neuroendocrine markers (eg, chromogranins) and lacking expression of typical...

CONTEXT RET/PTC rearrangements have been reported in papillary thyroid carcinomas with variable frequency in studies that used different detection methods. OBJECTIVE Our objective was to determine the role of different detection methods and tumor genetic heterogeneity on RET/PTC detection. DESIGN Sixty-five papillary carcinomas were analyzed for RET/PTC1 and RET/PTC3 using five detection me...

NK cells from the blood of chronic myelogenous leukemia (CML) patients are progressively decreased in number as the disease progresses from chronic phase to blast crisis. We hypothesize that BCR/ABL may be directly responsible by interfering with NK cell differentiation. CD34(+)HLA-DR(+) cells from CML patients were studied for their capacity to differentiate into NK cells. The NK cell cloning ...

We compared the incidence of submicroscopic deletions accompanying balanced translocations using interphase fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH) in 245 patients with chronic myeloid leukemia (CML), 79 patients with acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) and BCR-ABL (n=70) or MLL rearrangements (n=29), and 412 patients with acute myeloid leukemia (AML) with CBFB-MYH11 (n=122), PML-RARalpha (n=1...