Cell Biology
These organelles use digestive enzymes to break down proteins, lipids, carbohydrates, and nucleic acids. They also recycle worn-out cell parts and help maintain cellular homeostasis. They are often called the cell’s “garbage disposal.”
What are lysosomes?
This body's defense system protects against pathogens through three lines of defense: physical and chemical barriers, nonspecific innate responses, and specific adaptive responses.
What is the immune system?
These abnormal cells exhibit uncontrolled growth, ignore stop signals, resist programmed cell death, promote new blood vessel formation, invade other tissues, evade immune surveillance, and may express unique antigens called neoantigens.
What are the hallmarks of cancer?
This treatment is the most commonly administered when a systemic approach is needed to target cancer cells throughout the body.
What is chemotherapy?
These research studies involving children and adolescents with cancer evaluate new or improved treatments and supportive care—including medications, immunotherapy, targeted therapy, cellular therapy, surgery, and radiation—with the goal of improving outcomes while minimizing unnecessary harm.
What are pediatric cancer clinical trials?
These structures organize microtubules and help form the mitotic spindle during cell division, ensuring chromosomes are properly separated into two daughter cells.
What are centrioles?
This process describes how the immune system identifies and destroys abnormal cells, and how cancer progresses through three stages: elimination, equilibrium, and escape.
What is cancer immunoediting?
These changes involve altered transcription factors, continuously activated growth-promoting genes, disrupted signaling pathways, and defective cell-cycle checkpoints, ultimately leading to rapid, uncontrolled cell division.
What are the steps leading to uncontrolled cancer cell growth?
This type of cancer treatment aims to destroy malignant cells in a targeted area while causing as little harm as possible to surrounding healthy tissues.
What is radiation therapy?
This phase of a clinical trial primarily evaluates a new cancer therapy’s safety, side effects, and appropriate dose.
What is a Phase I clinical trial?
This three-stage process—reception, transduction, and response—allows a cell to convert an external chemical or physical signal into a specific internal response.
What is a signal transduction pathway?
These two major blood cell lineages originate from bone marrow stem cells and include myeloid cells and lymphoid cells, which play important roles in immune defense.
What are the two hematopoietic cell lineages?
These proteins work together to drive cell-cycle progression. Cyclin levels fluctuate, while CDK levels remain relatively constant. Binding of a specific protein activates the enzyme, which phosphorylates target proteins to trigger transitions between cell-cycle phases.
What are cyclins and cyclin-dependent kinases (CDKs)?
This combination therapy, involving very intensive chemotherapy followed by hematopoietic stem cell transplantation, is considered the standard of care for many hematologic malignancies.
What is high-dose chemotherapy?
This phase of a clinical trial evaluates whether a treatment shows activity or effectiveness against a specific type of cancer while continuing to monitor safety.
What is a Phase II clinical trial?
This final stage of a signaling pathway triggers specific cellular actions, such as activating gene expression, changing metabolism, promoting cell division, or initiating programmed cell death.
What is the cellular response?
These chemical signals act as the immune system’s “navigation system,” guiding and recruiting immune cells to sites of infection or tissue damage. For example, they attract neutrophils to the lungs during bacterial pneumonia.
What are chemokines?
These two types of genes regulate cell growth: one acts like the cell cycle’s gas pedal, while the other acts like its brakes. Mutations can lead to uncontrolled cell division and cancer.
What are proto-oncogenes and tumor suppressor genes?
This term describes the measurable change in tumor size or cancer burden after treatment, typically evaluated through surgical examinations, imaging studies, and serum biomarkers.
What is objective tumor response?
This ethical principle means acting in the child’s best interest by maximizing potential benefits and minimizing possible harm during research.
What is beneficence?
This process of nuclear division occurs in four main phases: prophase, metaphase, anaphase, and telophase.
What is mitosis?
This powerful pro-inflammatory cytokine activates macrophages, promotes fever, helps fight infections, and can contribute to chronic inflammatory diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis, Crohn’s disease, and psoriasis when produced excessively.
What is tumor necrosis factor-alpha (TNF-α)?
These two types of mutations differ in where they occur and whether they can be inherited. One occurs in body cells and is not passed to offspring, while the other occurs in reproductive cells and can be inherited, as seen in hereditary breast/ovarian cancer and Lynch syndrome.
What are somatic mutations and germline mutations?
These two factors allow malignant cells to evade chemotherapy-induced apoptosis, largely because their genetic instability enables them to adapt and resist antineoplastic agents.
What are chemical messengers & genetic mechanisms of drug resistance?
This ethical principle ensures that children are selected fairly for research, that the benefits and risks of clinical trials are distributed equitably, and that no group is unfairly burdened or excluded.
What is justice?