Recent reports have indicated human embryonic stem cells-derived midbrain dopamine (mDA) neurons as proper cell resources for use in Parkinson's disease (PD) therapy. Nevertheless, no detailed and systematic study has been conducted to identify which differentiation stages of mDA cells are most suitable for transplantation in PD therapy. Here, we transplanted three types of mDA cells, DA progen...

The encouraging response and improved survival of acute promyelocytic leukemia patients following retinoic acid treatment has rendered differentiation therapy an attractive option in cancer treatment. Given that terminal differentiation represents a considerable barrier in retinoblastoma tumorigenesis and that retinoblastoma has a significantly higher spontaneous degeneration rate compared with...

BACKGROUND Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is one of the leading causes of cancer-related deaths worldwide. The outcome of HCC therapy depends on the stage of HCC. Early-stage HCC patients can be cured with radical treatment approaches, whereas no standard treatment regimens can be recommended for patients with advanced disease. SUMMARY In-depth basic research into the molecular mechanisms of ...

Differentiation is a complex multistep process of cell specialization that begins with the installation of a genetic programme, named determination, specific for a cell lineage. Development of the differentiation programme includes the cell-type specific silencing of some genes and the expression of other genes, that regulate the biological functions associated with the cellular type and that d...

Acute promyelocytic leukemia (APL) is a specific type of acute myeloid leukemia characterized by the morphology of the blast cells, a specific t(15;17) translocation, and risks of definite coagulopathy. Recently this leukemia was further characterized by an exquisite sensitivity to all-trans retinoic acid's differentiation effect and the production of a fusion gene altering the gene of RARalpha...

Since their discovery in the early 2000s, microRNAs (miRNAs) and their penchant for RNA interference have taken the scientific community by storm, working their way into virtually every corner of biological inquiry. The very nature of their action, the ability to simultaneously extinguish the expression of a multitude of genes and negate their functions, immediately suggested therapeutic promis...

Retinoids are essential for the maintenance of epithelial differentiation. As such, they play a fundamental role in chemoprevention of epithelial carcinogenesis and in differentiation therapy. Physiological retinoic acid is obtained through two oxidation steps from dietary retinol, i.e. retinol-->retinal-->retinoic acid. The latter retinal-->retinoic acid step is irreversible and eventually mar...

Copyright: © 2014 Lin CY. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Recent studies have shown that many tumors contain a small population of cells, termed tumor-initiating cells or cancer stem cells (CSC...

Purpose To describe two cases of differentiation syndrome presenting with ocular manifestations including bilateral chorioretinopathy in patients with acute promyelocytic leukaemia treated with all-trans retinoic acid and arsenic trioxide differentiation therapy. Observations This observational case series identifies two patients at a single tertiary institution diagnosed with differentiation...

lncrnas (long non-coding rnas) are responsible to control the degradation process, rna stability, orchestration, inhibition, transcription and histone modification etc. these rnas have been termed as the key agents of several mechanisms such as development, organogenesis and regeneration of damaged tissues etc. they interact with a number of partner molecules either protein, rnas or dnas and co...