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Transurethral resection of the prostate (TURP) is a minimally invasive endoscopic procedure that requires experience and skill of the surgeon. To permit surgical training under realistic conditions we report a novel phantom of the human prostate that can be resected with TURP. The phantom mirrors the anatomy and haptic properties of the gland and permits quantitative evaluation of important surgical performance indicators. Mixtures of soft materials are engineered to mimic the physical properties of the human tissue, including the mechanical strength, the electrical and thermal conductivity, and the appearance under an endoscope. Electrocautery resection of the phantom closely resembles the procedure on human tissue. Ultrasound contrast agent was applied to the central zone, which was not detectable by the surgeon during the surgery but showed high contrast when imaged after the surgery, to serve as a label for the quantitative evaluation of the surgery. Quantitative criteria for performance assessment are established and evaluated by automated image analysis. We present the workflow of a surgical simulation on a prostate phantom followed by quantitative evaluation of the surgical performance. Surgery on the phantom is useful for medical training, and enables the development and testing of endoscopic and minimally invasive surgical instruments.

Anaplastic large-cell lymphoma (ALCL) is an aggressive non-Hodgkin lymphoma that shows in 60% of cases a translocation t(2, 5)(p23, q35), which leads to the expression of the oncogenic kinase NPM-ALK. The nuclear interaction partner of ALK (NIPA) defines an E3-SCF ligase that contributes to the timing of mitotic entry. It has been shown that co-expression of NIPA and NPM-ALK results in constitutive NIPA phosphorylation. By mass spectrometry-based proteomics we identified nine serine/threonine residues to be significantly upregulated in NIPA upon NPM-ALK expression. Generation of phospho-deficient mutants of the respective phospho-residues specified five serine/threonine residues (Ser-338, Ser-344, Ser-370, Ser-381 and Thr-387) as key phosphorylation sites involved in NPM-ALK-directed phosphorylation of NIPA. Analysis of the biological impact of NIPA phosphorylation by NPM-ALK demonstrated that the ALK-induced phosphorylation does not change the SCFNIPA-complex formation but may influence the localization of NIPA and NPM-ALK. Biochemical analyses with phospho-deficient mutants elucidated the importance of NIPA phosphorylation by NPM-ALK for the interaction of the two proteins and proliferation potential of respective cells: Silencing of the five crucial NIPA serine/threonine residues led to a highly enhanced NIPA-NPM-ALK binding capacity as well as a slightly reduced proliferation in Ba/F3 cells.

Activating mutations in FMS-like tyrosine kinase receptor-3 (FLT3) and Nucleophosmin-1 (NPM1) are most frequent alterations in acute myeloid leukemia (AML), and are often coincidental. The mutational status of NPM1 has strong prognostic relevance to patients with point mutations of the FLT3 tyrosine kinase domain (TKD), but the biological mechanism underlying this effect remains unclear. In the present study, we investigated the effect of the coincidence of NPM1c and FLT3-TKD. Although expression of FLT3-TKD is not sufficient to induce a disease in mice, coexpression with NPM1c rapidly leads to an aggressive myeloproliferative disease in mice with a latency of 31.5 days. Mechanistically, we could show that FLT3-TKD is able to activate the downstream effector molecule signal transducer and activator of transcription 5 (STAT5) exclusively in the presence of mutated NPM1c. Moreover, NPM1c alters the cellular localization of FLT3-TKD from the cell surface to the endoplasmic reticulum, which might thereby lead to the aberrant STAT5 activation. Importantly, aberrant STAT5 activation occurs not only in primary murine cells but also in patients with AML with combined FLT3-TKD and NPM1c mutations. Thus, our data indicate a new mechanism, how NPM1c mislocalizes FLT3-TKD and changes its signal transduction ability.