Active clinical trials for "Carcinoma"

Hepatocellular carcinoma is an aggressive disease with limited therapeutic options. Therefore, new approaches to treat this type of cancer are needed with immunotherapy potentially being one of these. As a first step in the development of novel therapies, expression analysis of specific markers, including tumor antigens will be carried out, and the correlation of expression with disease variables and clinical outcome will be assessed. This will be done retrospectively using archived hepatocellular carcinoma tissue samples.

Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is one of the tumors with an increasing incidence worldwide. Often treatment possibilities are limited and only palliative treatment such as a transarterial chemoembolisation (TACE) is possible. Therapeutic response is evaluated three months after TACE by imaging techniques (CT, MRI). In some HCC patients the tumor marker AFP ( alpha-fetoprotein) is elevated, but not all patients show this elevation. In the last years new tumor markers such as AFP-L3 (subfraction of AFP) and des-y-carboxyprothrombin (DCP) have been examined. In this clinical trial the course of these markers are examined after TACE in order to receive hints if the patient will be a therapeutic responder. Furthermore the investigators are interested in the quality of life after TACE. Patients receive a questionnaire with regard to the quality of life before and 3 months after TACE.

Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC)is the most frequent primitive tumour of the liver. Recently, several research studies reported that 11C-choline PET has shown a high detection rate of well differentiated HCC, which is an early stage of primary liver cancer. The aim of this study was to prospectively evaluate the diagnostic accuracy of 11C-choline PET-CT to detect HCC in cirrhotic or non cirrhotic patients.

All Hepatocellular carcinoma and Renal cell carcinoma patients who receive molecular targeted therapy will be candidates for the study. No additional treatment or intervention will be conducted except for blood sampling that will be limited to one time only. Blood samples (10 cc in volume) will be collected from all study participants once they provided written informed consent form. DNA will be extracted from peripheral blood samples using DNA isolation kit.

The objective of this study is to characterize genes associated either with susceptibility or resistance to the development nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC) in a Chinese population where the incidence of NPC is as high as 50 in 100,000. NPC has been and remains a unique model of human malignancy for understanding a multi-step carcinogenic process involving a ubiquitous virus (Epstein-Barr virus), environmental carcinogens, and an NPC susceptibility gene. Up to 95% of all NPC patients at early or late stage of the disease have IgA antibodies directed to the EBV virus VCA (viral capsid antigen). Environmental factors have also been implicated as significant risk factors in the development of NPC. In addition, certain alleles in HLA genes have shown associations with NPC, perhaps in concert with a family of T-cell receptor genes (TCR). Other data suggest that a microsatellite marker on Chromosome 6 may be associated with an NPC-disease associated gene.

The purpose of this study is to registrate long time clinical and histological treatment response of basal cell carcinoma (BCC) lesions treated with one or two procedures of dimethylsulfoxide supported 5-aminolaevulinic acid photodynamic therapy (DMSO-PDT).

The purpose of this study is to compare and evaluate the diagnostic performance of scrape cytology using two different cytological staining techniques, and to evaluate additional touch imprint cytology with that of histopathology of superficial basal cell carcinoma and actinic keratosis.

Human thyroglobulin (Tg) is the most sensitive biochemical marker for recurrence of differentiated cancer (DTC), especially after the complete removal of thyroid tissue through surgery and radioiodine therapy (RIT). Unfortunately, current assays for measuring Tg in blood samples are not sensitive enough to reliably measure Tg while patients are under thyroid hormone replacement therapy. Instead patients have to withdraw thyroid hormone for several weeks or receive costly injections of recombinant thyroid stimulating hormone (TSH) in order to raise Tg production by thyroid remnant and/or thyroid cancer cells so that it can be measured by current Tg assays. Other patients have antibodies against Tg that interfere in current immunoassays. The purpose of the study was to characterize a new highly sensitive assay for measuring Tg in the serum in thyroid cancer patients both on thyroid hormone therapy and off therapy in comparison to the normal routine assay already in use at Münster University Hospital.

Early stage HCC is treated by curative surgical resection or by local ablation (such as radio-frequency) as the current standard of care. The complete removal of clinical visible HCC is then confirmed by imaging by MRI or CT, or by a decline of tumor marker (AFP or PIVKA). However, despite an apparent complete removal of the HCC, those post-curative patients frequently develop tumor recurrence at a rate ranging 10-50% within the first year. The high rate of early HCC recurrence indicated a minimal residual HCC after the curative therapies in a significant proportion of patients. A better and more specific biomarker for detecting the residual HCC will improve the patients' prognosis prediction and therapeutic plan. To detect the minimal residual HCC, a biomarker unique to the tumor is needed. Currently, the cell-free circulating DNA carrying tumor-specific somatic mutations has been advocated as a promising one. It has been applied to investigate the tumor responses or resistances to cancer therapy. However, currently it is restricted to detect or follow only large advanced cancer, because of the difficulty in separating or enriching the cfDNA with tumor-specific mutations from the cfDNA from normal cells. In this project, the investigators proposed that one class of somatic mutation in HBV-related HCC, namely the insertion mutagenesis by integrated HBV DNA, could be adopted to circumvent this difficulty. HBV DNA integration has been found in the chromosomes of about 90% of HBV-related HCC and the integration site is unique to individual HCC. The HBV-host junction DNA fragment from one HCC is therefore a tumor-specific biomarker. Such fragments can be released into the circulation as cell-free circulating DNAs, and the detection of the HBV-host chimera DNAs in the circulation is a reliable evidence for the presence of the tumor in the patient. Therefore the cf circulating HBV-host chimera DNA is proposed to assay any minimal residual HCC after curative therapies.

This is a non-interventional study to observe the safety and efficiency of chemotherapy for potentially resectable locally advanced esophagogastric junction