The effect of clumping or aggregation of red blood cells on flow has recently become of increasing interest. Unimpeded flow through the capillaries depends to a great extent upon the red cells remaining separate in the plasma. Clumping causes blockage of the blood vessels, the extent of which is governed by the rate of flow and perfusion pressure, and the relative size of the clumps and lumen o...

The infectivity of cell-free HIV-1 is consistently reported to be less than 0.1% and the mechanisms influencing this low infectivity are not yet fully understood. Some hypothesize that this observed low infectivity results from the presence of defective HIV-1 particles, formed from mutations introduced in the reverse transcription step of virus replication. Using molecularly cloned HIV-1 that i...

Concentrated and purified retroviral preparations are useful in gene therapy protocols and in the study of retroviral function. For the transduction of refractory cell types, such as hematopoietic stem cells and for in vivo applications such as liver-directed gene therapy after induction of liver regeneration, gene transfer efficiencies can be increased by concentrating packaging cell-line supe...

Introduction: Chondrosarcoma is second to osteogenic sarcoma in frequency as a malignant tumor of bone. It is difficult to obtain wide surgical resection margins because of its location adjacent to neurovascular and visceral structures. Neither irradiation nor chemotherapy seems to be an effective treatment for chondrosarcoma; thus new protocols are needed. We reported gene therapy of chondrosa...

The expression of BMI-1 (B lymphoma Mo-MLV insertion region 1 homolog), a member of the polycomb-group genes (PcG), is well correlated with a poor prognosis and treatment failure among patients with malignancies such as myelodysplastic syndrome, chronic myeloid leukemia, acute myeloid leukemia and lymphoma. Recently, we found that BMI-1 renders B-cell lymphoma cells refractory to several anti-c...

Survival of patients with adult T-cell leukemia (ATL), which is caused by human T-cell lymphotropic virus type-1 (HTLV-1), has been improved by the introduction of anti-CCR4 monoclonal antibody and allogeneic hematopoietic stem cell transplantation. However, not all patients benefit from these modalities, necessitating a novel therapeutic strategy. Recently, an adoptive T-cell immunotherapy wit...

The lysine methyltransferase (KMT) SETMAR is implicated in response to and repair of DNA damage but its molecular function is not clear. More broadly, enzyme/substrate relationships are largely unknown for the dozens of predicted KMTs and hundreds or thousands of proteins modified by lysine methylation. SETMAR has been associated with di-methylation of histone H3 lysine 36 (H3K36) at sites of D...

Nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) inhibit the growth of different cancer cell types, suggesting a broad role for their cyclooxygenase (COX) targets and eicosanoid products in tumor cell growth. Sulindac sulfide, a COX inhibitor, inhibited the growth of non–small-cell lung cancers (NSCLC) both in soft agar and as xenografts in nude mice. Importantly, the concentration of sulindac sul...

One strategy used for gene therapy of cancer is molecular chemotherapy. This approach is based on selective expression of an encoded toxin in cancer cells to achieve their eradication. One potential advantage of this strategy derives from a phenomenon, termed the bystander effect, whereby only a fraction ofcells needs to be transduced to eradicate a tumor population. Despite the theoretical adv...

Purpose: Clinical trials to develop vitamin D3-based therapies for advanced prostate cancer were hindered by the risk of hypercalcemia and the limited antitumor benefit. We aimed to define factors predictive of the tumor growth response to vitamin D3 in patients with prostate cancer and specifically examine the role of its major catabolic enzyme, CYP24A1 in prostate tumorigenesis. Experimental ...