The outcomes of patients with genitourinary (GU) cancers have been steadily improving in recent years. Novel therapies have entered our armamentarium, while several other regimens are currently being ...studied in clinical trials. This recent explosion of new agents has improved patient survival and the quality of life for patients, but has also significantly increased the frequency of several side effects. The current review will focus on the potential ocular adverse reactions of GU neoplastic treatments. The broad spectrum of manifestations of ocular toxicity underscores the uniqueness and complexity of the anatomic, physiologic, and metabolic features of the human eye. Most side effects are mild in severity and transient, but some can be severe, disabling, and irreversible. Clinicians should be aware of complications that might be vision threatening and impact the patient's quality of life. In this review, we focused on the ocular toxicity of the antineoplastic regimens that are currently used for the treatment of GU, including prostate cancer, bladder cancer, renal cell carcinoma, testicular cancer, pheochromocytoma, adrenocortical carcinoma, and penile cancer.
Replicating episomal vectors (REV) are in principle able to provide long-term transgene expression in the absence of integration into the target cell genome. The scaffold/matrix attachment region ...(S/MAR) located 5′ of the human β-interferon gene (
IFNB1) has been shown to confer a stable episomal replication and retention function within plasmid vectors when stably transfected and selected in mammalian cells. The minimal requirement for the
IFNB1 S/MAR to function in DNA replication and episomal retention is transcription through this element. We used the erythroid β-globin locus control region-β-globin gene (βLCR-
HBB) microlocus cassette as a model to assess tissue-specific expression from within an
IFNB1 S/MAR-based plasmid REV. The βLCR-
HBB plus S/MAR combination constructs provided either high or low levels of transcription through the S/MAR element. Our results show that the βLCR-
HBB microlocus is able to reproducibly and stably express at full physiological levels on an episome copy number basis. In addition, our data show that even low levels of transcription from βLCR-
HBB through the S/MAR element are sufficient to allow efficient episomal replication and retention. These data provide the principles upon which generic and flexible expression cassette-S/MAR-based REVs can be designed for a wide range of applications.
In this paper we describe the use of five-colour fluorescence in situ hybridization for prenatal diagnosis of aneuploidy using uncultured amniotic fluid cells. The analysis is based on ratio mixing ...of dual-labelled probes and digital imaging for the detection and visualization of five different probes specific for the five target chromosomes, 13, 18, 21, X, and Y. A retrospective blind analysis of 30 coded uncultured amniotic fluid samples correctly detected fetal sex and five trisomy 21 cases. Multicolour fluorescence in situ hybridization used in this way allows rapid and simultaneous detection of the most frequent aneuploidies.
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