EARLY CLINICAL-EVALUATION OF NEUROBLASTOMA CELL DETECTION BY REVERSE TRANSCRIPTASE-POLYMERASE CHAIN-REACTION (RT-PCR) FOR TYROSINE-HYDROXYLASE MESSENGER-RNA

Disseminating disease in neuroblastoma is of considerable clinical imp ortance. Detection of circulating neuroblastoma cells using tyrosine h ydroxylase (TH) as a tissue-specific target for reverse transcriptase- polymerase chain reaction has proved to be a sensitive and specific me thod for the detection of contaminating tumour cells in peripheral blo od. The aim of this study was to report the early clinical observation s made using this technology in neuroblastoma patient blood samples. A strong association was found between the detection of neuroblastoma c ells in circulation with the detection of neuroblastoma in bone marrow . This method may be of use to monitor disease status and identify ear ly signs of relapse in clinically disease-free patients. These results show that RT-PCR detection of TH mRNA is a relatively noninvasive, se nsitive method for the detection of circulating tumour cells in neurob lastoma patients.