Apoptotic cell death in neuroblastoma.

Neuroblastoma (NB) is one of the most common malignant solid tumors in childhood, which derives from the sympathoadrenal lineage of the neural crest and exhibits extremely heterogeneous biological and clinical behaviors. The infant patients frequently undergo spontaneous regression even with metastatic disease, whereas the patients of more than one year of age who suffer from disseminated disease have a poor outcome despite intensive multimodal treatment. Spontaneous regression in favorable NBs has been proposed to be triggered by nerve growth factor (NGF) deficiency in the tumor with NGF dependency for survival, while aggressive NBs have defective apoptotic machinery which enables the tumor cells to evade apoptosis and confers the resistance to treatment. This paper reviews the molecules and pathways that have been recently identified to be involved in apoptotic cell death in NB and discusses their potential prospects for developing more effective therapeutic strategies against aggressive NB.