JCI table of contents: April 22, 2008

EDITOR'S PICK: Two types of image are better than one for analyzing tumors

Doctors treating individuals with cancer would find a noninvasive method to determine the amount of oxygen in a tumor very useful, because low levels of oxygen in a tumor have been linked to a poor outcome. A new method to do this and to image the surrounding organs and tissues at the same time has been developed and used to image tumors in mice by Murali Krishna and colleagues, at the National Institutes of Health, Bethesda. The importance of this technical advance for furthering our understanding of tumor development in pre-clinical studies is discussed in an accompanying commentary by Mark Dewhirst and colleagues, at Duke University, Durham. As are some of the challenges that need to be overcome to develop the approach for use in the clinic, where it could be used diagnostically to determine the best treatment approach for tumors and other diseases as well as to monitor responses to treatment.

TITLE: Low-field paramagnetic resonance imaging of tumor oxygenation and glycolytic activity in mice

AUTHOR CONTACT:
Murali C. Krishna
National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland, USA.
Phone: (301) 496-7511, Fax: (301) 480-2238, E-mail:

View the PDF of this article at: https://www.the-jci.org/article.php?id=34928

ACCOMPANYING COMMENTARY
TITLE: One-stop-shop tumor imaging: buy hypoxia, get lactate free

AUTHOR CONTACT:
Mark W. Dewhirst
Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, USA.
Phone: (919) 684-4180; Fax: (919) 684-8718; Email: .

View the PDF of this article at: https://www.the-jci.org/article.php?id=35543

TRANSPLANTATION: One reason why curative transplants might fail in type 1 diabetics

Individuals with autoimmune type 1 diabetes, which is caused by immune cells known as T cells attacking the body’s own insulin-producing pancreatic islet cells, need daily injections with insulin to control their blood sugar levels. This dependence on insulin injections can be circumvented by transplantation with islet cells. However, transplant recipients must be treated with a drug regimen, known as the Edmonton protocol, that decreases their number of T cells in an attempt to prevent the transplanted islet cells from being attacked by T cells that recognize the new islet cells as being from another human and from the same T cells that attacked the body’s original islet cells. Despite the drug regimen, islet cell transplants eventually fail in most recipients. New data, generated by Ezio Bonifacio and colleagues, at Dresden University of Technology, Germany, have indicated that the T cells that attacked the body’s original islet cells increase in number following treatment with the Edmonton protocol, leading them to suggest that this contributes to transplant failure.