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- Davidsson, Sabina, 1972-
(author)
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Infection induced chronic inflammation and it's association with prostate cancer initiation and progression
- 2013
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- An association between cancer development and inflammation has long been suggested. Approximately 20% of all human cancers in adults are assumed to result from chronic inflammation. The aim of this thesis was to investigate if infection-induced chronic inflammation plays a role in prostate carcinogenesis.Our results revealed a greater infiltration of the bacterium Propionibacterium acnes in the prostate tissue obtained from men with prostate cancer compared to men without any histological evidence of the disease. These findings indicate that prostate cancer could potentially be included in the list of cancers with an infectious etiology.Further, we investigated whether chronic inflammation has a role in disease progression. Our results demonstrated that men with lethal prostate cancer had pronounced infiltration of immune cells with suppressive function of the anti-tumor immune response compared to men with a more indolent prostate cancer.Confirmation of our results may open up avenues for targeted prostate cancer treatment by offering men with chronic inflammation alternative therapies such as anti-inflammatory drugs. If the involvement of P. acnes in prostate cancer development is replicated in other studies, vaccination therapies may be feasible. To further individualize prostate cancer therapy, bolstering the anti-tumor immune response in order to reduce tumor progression may be determined to be advantageous for some patients.
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| 3. |
- Carlsson, Jessica, 1984-
(author)
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Identification of miRNA expression profiles for diagnosis and prognosis of prostate cancer
- 2012
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- Cancer of the prostate (CaP) is the most common malignancy diagnosed in men in the Western society. During the last years, prostate specific antigen (PSA) has been used as a biomarker for CaP, although a high PSA value is not specific for CaP. Thus, there is an urgent need for new and improved diagnostic markers for CaP.In this thesis, the aim was to find a miRNA signature for diagnosis of CaP and to elucidate if differences in behavior between transition zone and peripheral zone tumors are reflected in miRNA expression. One of the major findings is anexpression signature based on nine miRNAs that with high accuracy (85%) could classify normal and malignant tissues from the transition zone of the prostate. The results furthermore show that the major differences in miRNA expression are found between normal and malignant tissues, rather than between the different zones. In addition, tumors arising in the peripheral zone have fewer changes in miRNA expression compared to tumors in the transition zone, indicating that the peripheral zone is more prone to tumor development compared to the transition zone of the prostate.A crucial step in pre-processing of expression data, in order to differentiate true biological changes, is the normalization step. Therefore, an additional aim of this thesis was to compare different normalization methods for qPCR array data in miRNA expression experiments. The results show that data-driven methods based on quantile normalization performs the best. The results also show that in smaller miRNA expression studies, only investigating a few miRNAs, RNU24 is the most suitable endogenous control gene for normalization.Taken together, the results in this thesis show the importance of miRNAs and the possibility of their future use as biomarkers in the field of prostate cancer.
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| 4. |
- Thurfjell, Viktoria, et al.
(author)
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Comparison of ROS1-rearrangement detection methods in a cohort of surgically resected non-small cell lung carcinomas
- 2022
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In: Translational Lung Cancer Research (TLCR). - : AME Publishing. - 2218-6751 .- 2226-4477. ; 11:12, s. 2477-2494
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Background: Patients with non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) harboring a ROS proto-oncogene 1 (ROS1)-rearrangement respond to treatment with ROS1 inhibitors. To distinguish these rare cases, screening with immunohistochemistry (IHC) for ROS1 protein expression has been suggested. However, the reliability of such an assay and the comparability of the antibody clones has been debated. Therefore we evaluated the diagnostic performance of current detection strategies for ROS1-rearrangement in two NSCLC-patient cohorts.Methods: Resected tissue samples, retrospectively collected from consecutive NSCLC-patients surgically treated at Uppsala University Hospital were incorporated into tissue microarrays [all n=676, adenocarcinomas (AC) n=40 1, squamous cell carcinomas (SCC) n=2 13, other NSCLC n=62]. ROS1rearrangements were detected using fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH) (Abbott Molecular; ZytoVision). In parallel, ROS1 protein expression was detected using IHC with three antibody clones (D4D6, SP384, EPMGHR2) and accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity were determined. Gene expression microarray data (Affymetrix) and RNA-sequencing data were available for a subset of patients. NanoString analyses were performed for samples with positive or ambiguous results (n=21).Results: Using FISH, 2/630 (0.3% all NSCLC; 0.5% non-squamous NSCLC) cases were positive for ROS1 fusion. Additionally, nine cases demonstrated ambiguous FISH results. Using IHC, ROS1 protein expression was detected in 24/665 (3.6% all NSCLC; 5.1% non-squamous NSCLC) cases with clone D4D6, in 18/639 (2.8% all NSCLC; 3.9% non-squamous NSCLC) cases with clone SP384, and in 1/593 (0.2% all NSCLC; 0.3% non-squamous NSCLC) case with clone EPMGHR2. Elevated RNA-levels were seen in 19/369 (5.1%) cases (Affymetrix and RNA-sequencing combined). The overlap of positive results between the assays was poor. Only one of the FISH-positive cases was positive with all antibodies and demonstrated high RNA-expression. This rearrangement was confirmed in the NanoString-assay and also in the RNA sequencing data. Other cases with high protein/RNA-expression or ambiguous FISH were negative in the NanoString-assay.Conclusions: The occurrence of ROS1 fusions is low in our cohorts. The IHC assays detected the fusions, but the accuracy varied depending on the clone. The presumably false-positive and uncertain FISH results questions this method for detection of ROS1-rearrangements. Thus, when IHC is used for screening, transcript-based assays are preferable for validation in clinical diagnostics.
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