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Brian Vastag

JAMA. 2001;286:295.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text and any section headings.

Like a scurrilous disguise artist, melanoma and ovarian cancer cells can change their clothing to mimic other cell types, reports a team from the University of Iowa College of Medicine and the National Institutes of Health. The findings deepen the mystery of the genetic misfirings in cancer cells, said Mary Hendrix, PhD, president of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology and head of the Department of Anatomy and Cell Biology at Iowa. "They're almost stem cell–like" in their ability to express characteristics of various cell types, said Hendrix. That's a clinical challenge, she added, because pathologists could misidentify the cells.

In particular, the team found that, in culture, aggressive melanoma cells make vascular endothelial (VE) cadherin, which was thought until now to be expressed only by endothelial cells. And like early endothelial cells, the melanoma marauders formed dense balls of tissue and channels, called embryonic vasculogenic . . . [Full Text of this Article]

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