HEMATOLOGICAL ONCOLOGY, VOL. 12, 87-88 (1994)

BOOK REVIEWS

SEROLOGICAL CANCER MARKERS. Stewart Sell (Ed.). Contemporary Biomedicine Series Humdna Press, Totowa, New Jersey. 1993. No. of pages: 536. Price: f93.00.

The declared purpose of this book, the fourth volume of a series on Cancer Markers, is ‘to provide an updated status report on today’s use of cancer markers in the diagnosis and monitoring of cancer, with an emphasis on cancer markers detected in the serum’.

The previous volumes were published in 1980, 1982 and 1985; the intervals are increasing, suggesting perhaps that some of the early excite- ment about tumour markers is fading. Interest- ingly, the editor points out that 803 publications on tumour markers were listed in Index Medicus in 1990 but fails to note that this is less than the total (858) for 1989. The truth is that as a result of the general availability of modern imaging tech- niques diagnostic markers have to be very good to be of clinical value and the additions to the clinical repertoire of a decade ago have been few.

There are 25 chapters, 12 of which are con- cerned with markers outside the sphere of the practising cancer clinician. For example the 32 pages of chapter 14 are dedicated to CA 19-9 or GICA (gastrointestinal cancer antigen). Among the remaining chapters there are some further

surprises if one expects to be guided by the book’s title, notably the long discussion of sex steroid hormone receptors in chapter 8. Established serum markers such as B-HCG and monoclonal proteins (myeloma) on the other hand are mentioned only in passing. Although alpha- fetoprotein merits a chapter and is described there as ‘the gold standard of cancer markers’ it is discussed almost exclusively in the context of liver disease and hepatocellular carcinoma. Indeed those interested in germ cell tumours will find this book seriously disappointing: testicular cancer has only two entries in the index; these refer the reader to two separate paragraphs about PLAP.

It seems entirely unclear for whom this book is intended and I suspect that the uneven coverage will mean that it is frustrating for the majority. There are clearly a number of specialized topics covered in depth, particularly the carbohydrate (CA 19-9, CA-50, TAG-72) and mucin (CA 15-3, CA-125, DU-Pan 2) epitopes which can be detected in the blood by monoclonal assay based tests. It is for the benefit of those interested in these areas that I would recommend that this book be available in larger institutional libraries.

CHRIS PRICE Medical Oncology Unit,

Royal South Hants Hospital, Southampton, U. K.

ADVANCES IN ENZYME REGULATION VOl. 33. G. Weber (Ed.). Pergamon Press

This volume records the proceedings of the 33rd symposium on the regulation of enzyme activity and synthesis held at Indiana University School of Medicine in October 1992. The book is divided into 10 sections, each reporting separate sessions of the meeting, with the tenth session being a special symposium lecture by L. E. Hokin. Each section has two (sometimes three) papers. The titles of the sessions are diverse, ranging over chemotherapy and resistance, the regulation of glucose metabolism, mitogenic signalling and

enzymology, reaction mechanisms, and the func- tions of proteases and peroxisomes. Not only are the titles of the sessions apparently unrelated, the individual papers within them lie uneasily together. For example, the penultimate session contains one paper on the cloning of two enzymes involved the metabolism of branched-chain amino acids, one paper on collagen genes in ras-mediated transfection, and one paper on the electrophile counterattack response. Some of the papers are related to biochemical aspects of malignancy, many are not. All of them are related in some way to the regulation of enzyme activity and synthesis, but since this more or less covers the whole

(0 1994 by John Wiley & Sons, Lta.