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with epothilones for the treatment of metastatic breast cancer. Semin Oncol 2008, 35: S22–30. quiz S40CrossRefPubMed 37. Chou TC, Zhang XG, Harris CR, Kuduk SD, Balog A, Savin KA, Bertino JR, Danishefsky SJ: Desoxyepothilone B is curative against human tumor xenografts that are refractory to paclitaxel. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 1998, 95: 15798–15802.CrossRefPubMed 38. Trivedi M, Budihardjo I, Loureiro K, Reid TR, Ma JD: Epothilones: a novel class of microtubule-stabilizing drugs for the treatment of cancer. Future Oncol 2008, 4: 483–500.CrossRefPubMed Competing interests The authors declare that they have no competing interests. Authors’ contributions RH conceived and designed the study, generated the primary Angiogenesis inhibitor cells from the tumor tissues, carried out the immune fluorescence analysis, aging studies and the chemotherapeutic assay and wrote the manuscript. CB carried out the cell surface marker analysis

and contributed to the chemotherapeutic assay and statistical analysis. The authors read and approved the final manuscript.”
“Background Gastric cancer (GC) is the second leading cause of cancer-related death in the world and remains Elafibranor supplier the top killing cancer in Asia including China [1, 2]. Though GC mortality has decreased markedly in most areas of the world, it is an aggressive malignancy and is still difficult to be detected at early stage [3]. Early GC (EGC) tends to be detected in countries with mass screening regimen using endoscopy and radiography. However, the perceived inconvenience, and discomforts caused by endoscopy and radiation have resulted in low compliance. The majority of GC patients are diagnosed at an advanced stage and died in 24 months after operation because of recurrence and metastasis, with only 27% 5-year overall survival rate in patients with extended local resection [4]. Thus, it is of clinical importance to identify GC patients with poor prognosis

for intense treatment. TNM Atorvastatin staging system is used world-widely to direct therapeutic decision, predict prognosis, and stratify patients into distinct groups with different risks for tumor-related death [5]. However, due to intrinsic heterogeneity, cancer patients with equivalent TNM stage, type and grade may have quite different response to treatment and clinical behavior. Moreover, changes of currently used serum-derived biomarkers of GC such as carcinoembryonic antigen (CEA), CA 19-9 and CA 72-4 usually appear in advanced stage, and therefore have limited value in clinics for predicting prognosis (lower than 40%) [6, 7]. Although the combined use of these biomarkers have shown certain improvement, their value is still far from ideal [8–10].