Review of: "Endogenous controls and microRNA profile in female patients with obstructive sleep apnea"

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Immunohistochemical biomarkers in gastric cancer research and management.

Gastric cancer still represents a major health problem, despite a decrease in its incidence in the last years. Due to the social impact of gastric cancer (GC), there is a need for novel biomarkers in order to stratify patients into appropriate screening, surveillance, or treatment programs. Although histopathology remains the most reliable and less expensive method, numerous efforts have been made searching for novel biomarkers. In recent years, several molecules have been identified and tested for their clinical relevance in GC management. In this paper, we will focus on a well-known GC marker, whose determination is mandatory in GC, HER2, a marker whose correlation with prognosis is still controversial (VEGF-A) and a quite novel, unconventional marker, the ether-à-go-go-related gene 1 (hERG1). All these proteins can be easily detected with immunohistochemistry, a technique widely used both in diagnostic and research laboratories that represents a link between surgical and molecular pathology, basic science, and clinical medicine

Ion channel expression as promising cancer biomarker

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Modeling TGF-β signaling pathway in epithelial-mesenchymal transition

The epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT) consists in a morphological change in epithelial cells characterized by the loss of the cell adhesion and the acquisition of mesenchymal phenotype. This process plays a crucial role in the embryonic development and in regulating the tissue homeostasis in the adult, but it proves also fundamental for the development of cancer metastasis. Experimental evidences have shown that the EMT depends on the TGF-β signaling pathway, which in turn regulates the transcriptional cellular activity. In this work, a dynamical model of the TGF-β pathway is proposed and calibrated versus existing experimental data on lung cancer A549 cells. The analysis combines Bayesian Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) and standard Ordinary Differential Equations (ODEs) techniques to interpolate the gene expression data via an iterative adjustments of the parameters involved. The kinetic of the Smad proteins phosphorylation, as predicted within the model is found in excellent agreement with available experiments, an observation that confirms the adequacy of the proposed mathematical picture