These results demonstrate that the addition of high doses of tamoxifen to this chemotherapy regimen does not increase the response rate compared with chemotherapy alone in unselected patients with metastatic melanoma.

Perifosine can be safely administered when given as an initial loading dose followed by daily maintenance therapy over 28 days. Gastrointestinal toxicity is common but generally of low grade. Hematological toxicity is minimal. No objective responses were observed. No further development of single-agent perifosine is recommended in malignant melanoma.

Flavopiridol is well tolerated at the dose regimen used in this study, with an acceptable (primarily GI) toxicity profile. Although 7 of the 16 patients had stable disease ranging from 1.8 to 9.2 months in duration, there was no evidence of significant clinical activity in malignant melanoma by objective response criteria.

Abstract:The architecture and weights of an artificial neural network model that predicts putative transmembrane sequences have been developed and optimized by the algorithm of structure evolution. The resulting filter is able to classify membrane/ nonmembrane transition regions in sequences of integral human membrane proteins with high accuracy. Similar results have been obtained for both training and test set data, indicating that the network has focused on general features of transmembrane sequences rather than specializing on the training data. Seven physicochemical amino acid properties have been used for sequence encoding. The predictions are compared to hydrophobicity plots.

Summary Flow cytometric (FCM) reticulocyte analysis using thiazole orange (TO) is becoming an increasingly popular method for routine quantification of reticulocytes. The methodology is accurate, cost‐effective and shows a high correlation with manual techniques. We describe our experience with the clinical application of FCM reticulocyte analysis in a general hospital setting over a 20‐month period with special emphasis on technical limitations.