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Experimental Teratoma

1974; Springer Science+Business Media; Linguagem: Inglês

10.1007/978-3-642-65857-0_2

0070-2188

Ivan Damjanov, Davor Solter,

Renal and related cancers

Teratomas are relatively rare tumors and make up but a small portion of all neoplasms in man. Despite their relative rarity, the abundant literature about teratomas is in disproportion to their incidence and clinical significance, as they have been a medical enigma and a subject of both speculation and experimentation for quite a long period of time. Several salient reasons for the contemporary interest in teratomas will be given in this review. As suggested by some oncologist (Pierce, 1967, 1970a, 1972), developmental biologists (Markert, 1968), and cancer immunologists (Prehn, 1972), teratoma might be one of the most fascinating and revealing tumor models for elucidation of several aspects of growth and differentiation, both of malignant and normal embryonic cells. Teratoma might be the unique clue to the understanding of cancer as a disease of differentiation and to understanding of differential gene expression as a common denominator for all forms of multicellular life, normal or aberant. It is not the purpose of this review to enumerate the complexities of the teratoma problem but to shadow forth the potential significance of numerous answers that could be obtained from the study of this tumor, especially of its most recently developed experimental models.