Two patients in eastern China presented with lumps on their legs. Both had extraskeletal myxoid chondrosarcoma, a soft-tissue cancer so uncommon that most pathologists encounter it a handful of times in a career. Under the microscope, the two tumors barely looked like the same disease.
Pathologists at Yantaishan Hospital, affiliated with Shandong Medical and Pharmaceutical University, laid out both cases in a report published in Discover Oncology. What tied the two together was not appearance. It was a rearrangement in the single gene NR4A3, detected by fluorescence in situ hybridization in each tumor.
