Astrocytoma, the most common brain tumor in humans, is usually malignant and virtually incurable. Two types of malignant astrocytomas can be distinguished histopathologically: anaplastic astrocytoma and glioblastoma multiforme. Studies using DNA markers that detect restriction fragment length polymorphisms have shown that loci on chromosomes 10 and 17p are lost frequently in tumor DNA from mali...

BACKGROUND/AIMS The mitotic kinesin superfamily protein KIF14 is essential for cytokinesis and chromosome segregation, and increased KIF14 expression is related to a variety of human cancers. However, the role of KIF14 in the development and malignant progression of astrocytomas and the underlying mechanisms remain unclear. The present study examined the relation between KIF14 and the pathogene...

CD47 is a membrane receptor that plays pivotal roles in many pathophysiological processes, including infection, inflammation, cell spreading, proliferation, and apoptosis. We show that activation of CD47 increases proliferation of human U87 and U373 astrocytoma cells but not normal astrocytes. CD47 function-blocking antibodies inhibit proliferation of untreated U87 and U373 cells but not normal...

PURPOSE To investigate the expression of CDC25B, which is a member of the cyclin-dependent kinase activating phosphatase family, in diffuse astrocytoma (DA), anaplastic astrocytoma (AA), glioblastoma multiforme (GBM), pilocytic astrocytoma (PA) and reactive gliosis (RG). Also, to study the relationship of the expression level of CDC25B with clinical parameters and with p53 and Ki-67 proliferati...

OBJECTIVE The number of evidences regarding the role of tumor stem cells (TSC) in the initiation and progression of high-grade astrocytomas became more and more numerous in the last years. This issue has been intensively tested in glioblastoma, but little attention has been paid for anaplastic astrocytoma. The main objective of this paper was to study the morphological characteristics of the xe...

Increased podocalyxin (PODXL) expression has been associated with a subset of aggressive types of cancer. To the best of our knowledge, the effect of PODXL on astrocytoma cell invasion and survival against chemotherapy agent was investigated for the first time in the present study. Overexpression and knockdown of PODXL were respectively performed in SW1783 (grade III astrocytoma) and U-87 (grad...

Astrocytoma is the most common malignant brain tumor in humans. Loss of the p53 signaling pathway and up-regulation of the ras signaling pathway are common during tumor progression. We have shown previously that mice mutant for Trp53 and Nf1 develop astrocytoma, progressing to glioblastoma, on a C57BL/6J strain background. In contrast, here we present data that mice mutant for Trp53 and Nf1 on ...

To further understand the biological significance of amplifications for glioma development and recurrencies, we characterized amplicon frequency and size in low-grade glioma and amplicon stability in vivo in recurring glioblastoma. We developed a 12q13-21 amplicon-specific genomic microarray and a bioinformatics amplification prediction tool to analyze amplicon frequency, size, and maintenance ...

Astrocytoma as a primary tumour is the core item in this section in which, by considering a pedigree-based research approach, the involvement of Ataxia-Telangiectasia (AT) gene is investigated. The two-hit -hypothesis of Knudson’s model is given to clarify the process of tumourigenesis in retinoblastoma. Lack of any available data for any hit hypothesis in brain tumours was the reason why the t...