**Meet the editor**

Hiroyuki Shimada, MD, PhD, FRCPA (Hon) currently works as a Pathologist in the Department of Pathology & Laboratory Medicine, Children's Hospital Los Angeles and as a Professor at the University of Southern California Keck School of Medicine, Los Angeles, California in USA. He is also engaged as the Pathologist-of-Record for the Children's Oncology Group, Neuroblastoma Biology

Study, and as Chair of the International Neuroblastoma Pathology Committee. He was born in Tokyo, Japan (1948), graduated from Yokohama City University School of Medicine, Yokohama, Japan (1973) and completed Pathology Training at the Children's Hospital and the Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio, USA (1988). He is a founder of the International Neuroblastoma Pathology Classification (1999). He is actively reviewing pathology samples of about 700 neuroblastoma cases per year from United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.

Contents

**Preface VII**

Josef Malis

**Section 1 Neuroblastoma, Clinical 1**

**Section 2 Neuroblastoma, Biology - 1 23**

Fergal C. Kelleher

**Human Neuroblastoma 47**

**Human Neuroblastoma 109**

Fieke Lamers and Aru Narendran

Mandeep Sidhu and Daniel J. Belliveau

and Andrew R. Mackay

Chapter 1 **Clinical Presentation of Neuroblastoma 3**

Chapter 2 **A Novel Diagnostic Tool for Therapy Stratification of**

**Circulating Tumor-Released DNA in Serum 13** Shigeki Yagyu, Tomoko Iehara and Hajime Hosoi

Chapter 3 **Close Neighbours on Chromosome 2 the ALK and MYCN Genes.**

Chapter 4 **Neurotrophin and Neurotrophin Receptor Involvement in**

Chapter 5 **Connexin36 is a Negative Regulator of Differentiation in**

Chapter 6 **Pathways of Intrinsic Apoptosis in Neuroblastoma: Targets for Therapeutics and New Drug Development 131**

**Neuroblastoma: Preoperative Analysis of Tumor Biology Using**

**Implications for Targeted Therapeutics in Neuroblastoma 25**

Pierdomenico Ruggeri, Antonietta R. Farina, Lucia Cappabianca, Natalia Di Ianni, Marzia Ragone, Stefania Merolle, Alberto Gulino
