Cancer staging

Cancer staging is the process of determining the extent to which a cancer has grown and spread. A number from I to IV is assigned, with I being an isolated cancer and IV being a cancer that has metastasized and spread from its origin. The stage generally takes into account the size of a tumor, whether it has invaded adjacent organs, how many regional (nearby) lymph nodes it has spread to (if any), and whether it has appeared in more distant locations (metastasized). The staging system is not applicable to astrocytoma, which is expressed as "grade I–IV". Grade IV astrocytoma, more commonly called glioblastoma multiforme, is a universally fatal primary brain cancer most commonly seen in the seventh decade of life. TNM staging system TNM staging system Cancer staging can be divided into a clinical stage and a pathologic stage. In the TNM (Tumor, Node, Metastasis) system, clinical stage and pathologic stage are denoted by a small "c" or "p" before the stage (e.g., cT3N1M0 or

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Tissue engineering is an interdisciplinary field that broadly impacts human health. This course provides students an overview of how engineering approaches can be used to investigate and manipulate cell and tissue functions and enable students to be on the cutting edge of tissue engineering.

Development and Characterization of a Microfluidic Chip to Capture Circulating Prostate Cancer Cells

Colette Bichsel

The analysis of circulating tumor cells (CTCs) from the blood of cancer patients promises a better understanding of metastasis formation and tumor phenotypes. CTCs are rare (there is 1 CTC in 1 billion of circulating blood cells) and therefore challenging to isolate. Recently developed highly sensitive microfluidic platforms made a leap forward in trapping these cells efficiently. This work focused on the development of a microfluidic platform that specifically captures prostate cancer cells from a whole blood sample. The versatility of the system was exploited by tethering different capturing antibodies on the microchip surface. Circulating prostate tumor cells were successfully recognized with the microfluidic chip. Furthermore, the platform was enhanced to carry out proliferation assays of captured cells directly on the chip, using hydrogel as a three-dimensional cell culture matrix. Although further improvements regarding the on-chip proliferation assay need to be done, the potential benefit of a functional readout promises new insights in cancer progression that can be translated to advanced cancer staging or prognostic tools.

2011

Expression of E-Cadherin in Epithelial Cancer Cells Increases Cell Motility and Directionality through the Localization of ZO-1 during Collective Cell Migration

Hwanseok Jang

Collective cell migration of epithelial tumor cells is one of the important factors for elucidating cancer metastasis and developing novel drugs for cancer treatment. Especially, new roles of E-cadherin in cancer migration and metastasis, beyond the epithelial-mesenchymal transition, have recently been unveiled. Here, we quantitatively examined cell motility using micropatterned free edge migration model with E-cadherin re-expressing EC96 cells derived from adenocarcinoma gastric (AGS) cell line. EC96 cells showed increased migration features such as the expansion of cell islands and straightforward movement compared to AGS cells. The function of tight junction proteins known to E-cadherin expression were evaluated for cell migration by knockdown using sh-RNA. Cell migration and straight movement of EC96 cells were reduced by knockdown of ZO-1 and claudin-7, to a lesser degree. Analysis of the migratory activity of boundary cells and inner cells shows that EC96 cell migration was primarily conducted by boundary cells, similar to leader cells in collective migration. Immunofluorescence analysis showed that tight junctions (TJs) of EC96 cells might play important roles in intracellular communication among boundary cells. ZO-1 is localized to the base of protruding lamellipodia and cell contact sites at the rear of cells, indicating that ZO-1 might be important for the interaction between traction and tensile forces. Overall, dynamic regulation of E-cadherin expression and localization by interaction with ZO-1 protein is one of the targets for elucidating the mechanism of collective migration of cancer metastasis.

MDPI2021

Classification of Healthy and Cancer States of Colon Epithelial Tissues Using Opto-magnetic Imaging Spectroscopy

Marko Baros, Ivan Dimitrijevic

Colorectal carcinoma (CRC) as a major health problem in industrialized countries is highly preventable and can be successfully treated in the early stages. However, incidence and mortality of CRC has increased over the last two decades. The reason could be that the current recommended options for screening are costly, unpleasant for patients, have low sensitivity and poor accessibility for screening. These reasons provide a strong rationale for the development of a new method. Opto-magnetic imaging spectroscopy (OMIS) as a new imaging method for the characterisation of various materials, including human tissues, is based on light-matter interaction, using a Poincare sphere for light properties and a Bloch sphere for electron properties, and allows the detection of biophysical characteristics within human tissue samples. Compared with histopathology examination, the OMIS method achieved an accuracy of 92.59% using Multilayer Perceptron Neural Network as a classifier, and 89.87% using Naive-Bayes, respectively. The obtained results, based on the investigation of 316 samples, both tumour and normal mucosa (162 cancer cases), strongly suggest that the new non-invasive OMIS method might be used for tissue characterization ex vivo to discriminate between the healthy and carcinoma state of the colon. However, it opens up the possibility of using the same method in in vivo studies to assist physicians in targeting biopsies of colorectal tissue.

2019

Cancer

Cancer is a group of diseases involving abnormal cell growth with the potential to invade or spread to other parts of the body. These contrast with benign tumors, which do not spr

Metastasis

Metastasis is a pathogenic agent's spread from an initial or primary site to a different or secondary site within the host's body; the term is typically used when referring to metastasis by a cancerou

Chemotherapy

Chemotherapy (often abbreviated to chemo and sometimes CTX or CTx) is a type of cancer treatment that uses one or more anti-cancer drugs (chemotherapeutic agents or alkylating agents) as part of a sta