Cancer stem cells (CSCs) are a small and elusive subpopulation of self-renewing cancer cells with remarkable ability to initiate, propagate, and spread the malignant disease. In addition, they exhibit increased resistance to anticancer therapies, thereby contributing to disease relapse. CSCs are reported to be present in many tumor types such as melanoma, sarcoma, mammary tumors, colon cancer and other solid tumors. These cells from different tumors show unique energetic and metabolic pathways. For example, CSCs from one type of tumor may predominantly use aerobic glycolysis, while from another tumor type may utilize oxidative phosphorylation. Most commonly these cells use fatty acid oxidation and ketone bodies as the main source of energy production. CSCs have a remarkable ability to reprogram their metabolism in order to survive under adverse conditions such as hypoxia, acidosis, and starvation. There is increasing interest to identify molecular targets that can be utilized to kill CSCs and to control their growth. In this review, we discuss how an understanding of the unique metabolism of CSCs from different tumors can offer promising strategies for targeting CSCs and hence to prevent disease relapse and to treat the metastatic disease.

India has a rapidly growing population inflicted with cancer diagnosis. From an estimated incidence of 1.45 million cases in 2016, the cancer incidence is expected to reach 1.75 million cases in 2020. With the limitation of facilities for cancer treatment, the only effective way to tackle the rising and humongous cancer burden is focusing on preventable cancer cases. Approximately, 70% of the Indian cancers (40% tobacco related, 20% infection related and 10% others) are caused by potentially modifiable and preventable risk factors. We review these factors with special emphasis on the Indian scenario. The results may help in designing preventive strategies for a wider application.

INTRODUCTIONGliomas are the most common brain tumour with an annual incidence of 5-10/100,000 persons. Among gliomas, the most common histology is GBM [1]. Mean age of presentation of glioma is 40-45 years and that of GBM is 55-60 years. Patients diagnosed with anaplastic astrocytoma have a median survival of three years after diagnosis but the median survival is only 14 months following the diagnosis of GBM [1].The treatment of GBM has evolved over the years from surgery alone to surgery followed by postoperative Radiotherapy (RT). Studies have shown that extent of resection has prognostic importance. Pichlmeier U et al., reported that patients without residual contrastenhancing tumour had a higher overall median survival time than those with residual enhancing tumour (17.9 vs 12.9 months, respectively (p<0.001) [2].Randomized trials have demonstrated a clear survival benefit of the use of RT after surgery [3]. In a systemic review of postoperative RT in GBM, Laperriere N et al., showed significant (p<0.001) survival benefit of postoperative RT over supportive care [4]. Relative risk of GBM patients treated with postoperative RT for one-year mortality was 0.81. The understanding of tumour biology and recurrence patterns helped to shift from whole brain RT practice to partial brain irradiation.In a phase III trial comparing concurrent chemoradiation with TMZ and adjuvant six cycles TMZ 150-200 mg/m 2 every four weeks, Stupp R et al., showed increased median OS of 14.6 months compared to 12.1 months in the RT only arm and two year survival of 26.5% compared to 10.6% in the RT only arm [5]. Now, the standard of care for a newly diagnosed patient of GBM is maximal safe resection followed by concurrent chemoradiation with TMZ and then further adjuvant TMZ for six cycles as per regimen by Stupp R et al., and referred to as conventional TMZ (C-TMZ) further in this article [5].Several modifications are being tried in order to further improve the survival over that conferred by C-TMZ [5]. With a hypothesis that continuous daily administration of TMZ is more effective than a single dose, clinical trials with TMZ explored a wide range of dosing schedules aiming at maximum O 6 -Methylguanine Methyltransferase (MGMT) depletion in tumour cells [6]. However, this concept failed to show any improvement in the RTOG 0525 trial [7] which randomly assigned patients with newly diagnosed GBM to receive standard radiation and six cycle's maintenance TMZ or dose dense TMZ for 12 cycles.Another strategy postulated is to use extended cycles of adjuvant TMZ (E-TMZ) beyond the current standard of six cycles as used in C-TMZ regimen. Studies have shown promising survival with the use of E-TMZ; however, the reports are mostly limited to retrospective studies with significant bias [8,9].We did this prospective randomized study with a hypothesis that E-TMZ for total of 12 adjuvant cycles would improve OS of patients with newly diagnosed GBM as compared to C-TMZ. We also sought to assess the difference in the toxicity profiles of these two reg...

BACKGROUND: Systemic therapy with radionuclides may be used for the treatment of patients with painful skeletal

Introduction: Before the experiment on kidney disorder, it is important to know the basic physiologies of the animal kidney because the anatomical and physiological features of the kidney are varying in different kind of experimental animals used for the basic study. This study focus on the variations in the nephron, a morphological process of podocytes, a path of the renal arteries, a position of the medulla and renal cortex are unusual in different animals. In human, middle and caudal lobe is larger while in rat small rounded cranial lobe present in comparison to other experimental animals. Statistically the mean length 10.40 ± 0.90 cm, width 4.20 ± 0.70 cm, thickness 1.5 ± 0.20 cm, and weight 136.71 ± 31.74 g; while in rat the mean length 1.54 ± 0.02 cm, width 0.85 ± 0.07 cm, thickness 0.73 ± 0.02 cm and weight 0.64 ± 0.03 g. Human has shorter loops of Henle, which dip only into the outer medulla while in monkey both the renal cortex and medulla are higher in numbers than in dogs. The renal lobule of mallard species was comparatively divided into two equal cortical and medullary regions while in chickens the cortical region was the larger as compared to medullary region resembling numerous mammalian types and few of swine type. In contrast, the severity of tubular degeneration, inflammation, fibrosis, tubular epithelial single-cell necrosis, and decreased normal parenchyma is responsible for proteinuria. The morphological process of podocyte development has been reported in the classic kidney of human, horse, goat, monkey, rabbit, cat, dog, chicken, medaka fish, rat and guinea pig indicating that it would be a good model system for studying renal regeneration.

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract