BACKGROUND Previous epidemiologic studies have suggested that exposure to pesticides in utero and during early childhood may increase the risk for development of childhood cancer, including Wilms tumor, a childhood kidney tumor. OBJECTIVES In this analysis we evaluated the role of residential pesticide exposure in relation to the risk of Wilms tumor in children using data from a North America...

Genomic imprinting is the parental allele specific expression of genes and has recently been shown to occur in humans. Evidence for a role for genomic imprinting in human cancer comes from the finding of preferential retention of paternal alleles in embryonal tumors undergoing loss of heterozygosity, e.g., Wilms' tumor and osteogenic sarcoma. Recent studies have demonstrated imprinting of the i...

Several studies report autoantibody signatures in cancer. The majority of these studies analyzed adult tumors and compared the seroreactivity pattern of tumor patients with the pattern in healthy controls. Here, we compared the autoimmune response in patients with neuroblastoma and patients with Wilms tumor representing two different childhood tumors. We were able to differentiate untreated neu...

The Wilms' tumor 1 gene (WT1) encodes a transcription factor of the zinc-finger family. As a result of alternative RNA splicing, the gene can be expressed as four polypeptides that differ in the presence or absence of a stretch of 17 amino acids just NH2 terminal of the four zinc fingers and a stretch of three amino acids (+/-KTS) between zinc fingers 3 and 4. In this study, cDNA constructs enc...

Wilms tumor is the most common pediatric kidney cancer. To identify transcriptional and epigenetic mechanisms that drive this disease, we compared genome-wide chromatin profiles of Wilms tumors, embryonic stem cells (ESCs), and normal kidney. Wilms tumors prominently exhibit large active chromatin domains previously observed in ESCs. In the cancer, these domains frequently correspond to genes t...

Wilms tumor, the most common kidney tumor in children, is rarely seen in adults, making it a challenge for the adult oncologist to diagnose and treat. Unlike with renal cell carcinoma, patients with Wilms tumor should receive adjuvant chemotherapy with or without radiation therapy. Adult oncologists may not be familiar with pediatric oncology protocols, so it is important to consult with pediat...

Wilms tumor 1 (WT1) gene is a tumor supressor gene, expressed in malignant and normal hematopoietic progenitor cells. Prognostic significance of this gene in childhood acute lymphoid leukemia (ALL) is not clear. We evaluated the presence of WT1 expression in bone marrow samples of 28 children with de novo ALL at diagnosis by two step RT-PCR. Expression of WT1 gene was detected in 78.5% of patie...