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Telomerase activity has been demonstrated at low levels in peripheral blood lymphocytes but at high levels in germinal centre B cells and thymocyte subpopulations. This study shows that telomerase is activated in the normal human thymus at different times of life. Telomerase activity was detected in thymic protein extracts from two newborn babies and from a 12 year old boy, as well as in extracts from two of six adult patients. The two positive cases were patients aged 54 and 66 years. These results suggest strongly that the thymus can remain functional despite involution in elderly patients.

Suppression subtractive hybridization (SSH) was used to isolate genes that were differentially expressed in anaplastic lymphoma kinase (ALK)-positive and ALK-negative anaplastic large cell lymphoma. In addition, this approach was applied to Hodgkin's disease cases with different clinical outcomes. SSH combines a normalization step that equalizes the abundance of cDNAs within the sequences to be tested and a subtraction step that excludes the common sequences between the target and the control. In a model system, the SSH technique enriches for rare sequences up to 5,000-fold in one round. We have isolated several genes whose expression varied significantly with regard to the tumour subtypes. There were different genes with known or unknown functions. We aim to compare the results of the SSH approach with those obtained with high density filters. In a near future, we would like to design DNA chips specific of each pathology that could be used for clinical purposes (evaluation of prognosis and therapeutic response).

Telomerase activation has been shown to be an almost universal property of malignant tumors evoking its role in the immortalisation process. We used the recently described sensitive and rapid detection assay called telomeric repeat amplification protocol (TRAP) to detect telomerase activity in neoplastic and non neoplastic tissues. Human telomerase is a ribonucleoprotein which functions as a telomere terminal transferase by adding multiple repeats of the TTAGGG hexamer at the 3'-OH ends of either telomeres or oligonucleotide specifically designed for the TRAP assay. Whenever present, telomerase activity is revealed on acrylamide gel by a six nucleotide ladder of extension products. Detection of telomerase activity may be evaluated for differentiating neoplastic from non neoplastic tissues. In addition, quantitation of telomerase activity may serve as prognostic marker for malignant tumors.

Telomerase activity is known to be absent from most normal and well-differentiated tissues, although being detectable in the vast majority of malignant tumors. An increasing number of reports demonstrate that telomerase may be activated in benign tumors, such as adenomas. We have investigated a series of normal and neoplastic thyroid tissues for the presence of telomerase activity. As expected, all normal thyroid tissues (n = 20) had no display of telomerase activity. Amongst cancers, the incidence of telomerase activity varied with the histological subtypes. Telomerase activity was present in only 3/15 cases (20%) of papillary carcinomas. Telomerase activity was more frequently detected in follicular (4/6) and in undifferentiated (2/3) carcinomas. Unexpectedly, one case (1/12) of adenoma contained high levels of telomerase activity. Taken together, these results indicate that telomerase may play some role in the pathogenesis of thyroid tumors, in particular in follicular and undifferentiated carcinomas that are known to have the most aggressive behavior.

The Papanicolaou cervical smear method has long been used for cervical cancer screening, but there is a trend to develop liquid based cytology media and monolayer techniques to reduce false negative rates. These last two types of technique seem to increase the sensitivity of cervical cancer detection,1 and also provide cellular residues that are useful either for spotting additional slices or performing molecular techniques, such as hybrid capture or the polymerase chain reaction (PCR).2 Different media exist and to date the PreservCyt™ medium used in the ThinPrep™ Pap Test™ method (Cytyc, Boxborough, Massachusetts, USA) has been validated by the …