Neuroblastoma (NB) is the most commonly occurring solid tumor in children. The disease usually arises in the adrenal medulla, and it is characterized by a remarkable heterogeneity in its progression. Most NB patients with an advanced disease have massive bone marrow infiltration at diagnosis. Lung metastasis represents a widely disseminated stage and is typically considered to be a terminal eve...

Neuroblastoma (NB), the most common extracranial solid tumor in childhood is associated with poor prognosis in patients with advanced tumor stages. Natural human cytotoxic anti-NB IgM antibodies present in the serum of healthy humans are discussed as a potential novel immunotherapeutic regimen against human NB because these antibodies have been shown to affect growth arrest of solid s.c. xenogr...

The electronic and structural properties of a series of triniobium oxide clusters, Nb(3)O(n)(-) and Nb(3)O(n) (n = 3-8), are investigated using photoelectron spectroscopy (PES) and density functional theory (DFT) calculations. PES spectra are obtained for Nb(3)O(n)(-) (n = 3-8) at various photon energies and are used to compare with the DFT calculations. A trend of sequential oxidation is obser...

BACKGROUND The existing evidence that nanobacteria (NB) are closely associated with human disease is overwhelming. However, their potential toxicity against cancer cells has not yet been reported. The objective of this study was to investigate the cytotoxic effects of NB and nanohydroxyapatites (nHAPs) against human breast cancer cells and to elucidate the mechanisms of action underlying their ...

Neuroblastoma (NB) is a highly metastatic tumor in children. The epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT) is an important mechanism for both the initiation of tumor invasion and subsequent metastasis. This study investigated the role of EMT in the progression of NB. Using EMT assays on samples from 11 tumors, we identified 14 genes that were either differentially expressed between tumors of diff...

PURPOSE AND EXPERIMENTAL DESIGN Neuroblastoma (NB) is a common pediatric solid tumor that exhibits a striking clinical bipolarity: favorable and unfavorable. Favorable NB genes (EPHB6, EFNB2, EFNB3, NTRK1, and CD44) are genes whose high-level expression predicts favorable NB outcome, and forced expression of these genes inhibits growth of unfavorable NB cells. In this study, we investigated whe...

High-resolution coreand valence-level photoemission spectra of Nb-doped TiO2 ceramics (Ti12xNbxO2 with 0.01,x,0.8) have been measured using monochromatic x-ray excitation. Nb doping produces a welldefined photoemission peak in the bulk band gap of rutile, whose intensity increases with increasing doping level. Core-level spectroscopy shows that the Nb is incorporated within the rutile lattice a...

Homozygous normoblastosis (nb/nb) mice, whose red blood cell (RBC) membranes are nearly completely deficient in full-length 210-kD ankyrin, were used to study interactions between ankyrin and protein 4.2 (P4.2). Although it is unclear whether or not these proteins interact in the membrane, both ankyrin and P4.2 bind to the cytoplasmic domain of band 3 (cdb3). In addition to the complete deficie...

The superconducting proximity effect was examined in both Nb/PdNi (SF) bilayer films and Nb/PdNi/Nb (SFS) Josephson junctions. In Nb/PdNi bilayer films, nonmonotonic behavior of Tc was observed as a function of PdNi thickness dF. The effective exchange energy Eex extracted from the data was about 13 meV. In Nb/PdNi/Nb (SFS) Josephson junctions, the existence of a crossover between the 0 state a...

Neuroblastoma (NB), the most common extracranial pediatric solid tumor, continues to cause significant cancer-related morbidity and mortality in children. Dysregulation of oncogenic receptor tyrosine kinases (RTKs) has been shown to contribute to tumorigenesis in various human cancers and targeting these RTKs has had therapeutic benefit. RET is an RTK which is commonly expressed in NB, and high...