PML as a potential predictive factor of oxaliplatin/fluoropyrimidine-based first line chemotherapy efficacy in colorectal cancer patients

PML regulates a wide range of pathways involved in tumorigenesis, such as apoptosis, which is also one of the main mechanisms through which oxaliplatin and fluoropyrimidine exert their antineoplastic activity. The present study aims to investigate PML expression as a predictive factor of oxaliplatin/fluoropyrimidine therapy efficacy. EXPERIMENTAL DESIGN: 74 metastatic colorectal cancer patients who received oxaliplatin/floropyrimidine-based first line therapy have been included in this retrospective study. PML expression was assessed by immunohistochemistry. RESULTS: PML down-regulation was detected in 39 (52.7%) patients (14 complete and 25 partial PML loss). RR was significantly lower (25.6%) in patients with PML down-regulation than in patients with preserved PML expression (60%) (P\u2009=\u20090.006). Median TTP was 5.5 months when PML was down-regulated versus 11.9 months in case of preserved PML expression (P\u2009<\u20090.0001). A statistical significant difference was also detected in OS (15.6 and 24.5 months respectively, P\u2009=\u20090.003). The impact of PML down-regulation on TTP and OS was statistically significant also in a multivariate model. CONCLUSIONS: This study represents the first evidence of a possible correlation between PML protein expression and outcome of metastatic colorectal cancer patients treated with oxaliplatin/fluoropyrimidine-based first line therapy

Promyelocytic leukemia (PML) gene expression is a prognostic factor in ampullary cancer patients

BACKGROUND: Promyelocytic leukemia (PML) tumor suppressor gene plays a key role in acute PML pathogenesis but its involvement in pathogenesis and prognosis of solid cancers has not been defined yet. PATIENTS AND METHODS: In all, 62 ampullary adenocarcinoma patients who underwent curative surgery between 1996 and 2005 were included. Expression analysis of PML was carried out by immunohistochemical staining and correlated with disease-free survival (DFS) and overall survival (OS). RESULTS: In 24 tumor specimens (38.7%), PML was classified as absent, in 16 (25.8%) as focally expressed and in 22 (35.5%) as diffusely expressed. By univariate analysis, DFS was significantly influenced by pathological T stage (P=0.03), lymph nodal involvement (P=0.002), and PML expression (P=0.001). DFS in patients without PML expression was 28.0 months versus 45.1 and 75.5 for patients with focal and diffuse expression, respectively. OS in the group of patients without PML expression, with focal expression, and with diffuse expression was 40, 48, and 77 months, respectively (P=0.002). By a multivariate analysis, PML expression was the strongest prognostic factor for DFS (P=0.003) and the only statically significant prognostic factor for OS (P=0.009). CONCLUSIONS: Our preliminary data suggest PML as a novel prognostic tool for ampullary cancer patients

Supporting XML Security Models Using Relational Databases: A Vision

As the secure distribution and sharing of information over the World Wide Web becomes increasingly important, the needs for flexible and e#cient support of access control systems naturally arise. Since the eXtensible Markup Language (XML) is emerging as the format of the Internet era for storing and exchanging information, there have been, recently, many proposals to extend the XML model to incorporate security aspects. To the lesser or greater extent, however, such proposals neglect the fact that the data for XML documents will most likely reside in relational databases, and consequently do not utilize various security models proposed for and implemented in relational databases

Similarity Caching in Large-Scale Image Retrieval

Feature-rich data, such as audio-video recordings, digital images, and results of scientific experiments, nowadays constitute the largest fraction of the massive data sets produced daily in the e-society. Content-based similarity search systems working on such data collections are rapidly growing in importance. Unfortunately, similarity search is in general very expensive and hardly scalable. In this paper we study the case of content-based image retrieval (CBIR) systems, and focus on the problem of increasing the throughput of a large-scale CBIR system that indexes a very large collection of digital images. By analyzing the query log of a real CBIR system available on the Web, we characterize the behavior of users who experience a novel search paradigm, where content-based similarity queries and text-based ones can easily be interleaved. We show that locality and self-similarity is present even in the stream of queries submitted to such a CBIR system. According to these results, we propose an effective way to exploit this locality, by means of a similarity caching system, which stores the results of recently/frequently submitted queries and associated results. Unlike traditional caching, the proposed cache can manage not only exact hits, but also approximate ones that are solved by similarity with respect to the result sets of past queries present in the cache. We evaluate extensively the proposed solution by using the real query stream recorded in the log and a collection of 100 millions of digital photographs. The high hit ratios and small average approximation error figures obtained demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach