Background/Aim: Oral ganciclovir effectively prevents CMV disease, but late-onset CMV disease is increasingly observed in pancreas-kidney and bone-marrow transplants recipients, specially with long-term prophylaxis. Then, the aim of this study was to verify if prolonged administration of oral ganciclovir prophylaxis could induce late CMV recurrence or disease in renal transplant recipients Mate...

In variational data assimilation, optimal ingestion of the observational data and optimal use of prior physical and statistical information involve the choice of numerous weighting, smoothing and tuning parameters which control the ltering and merging of divers sources of information. Generally these weights must be obtained from a partial and imperfect understanding of various sources of error...

The herpes simplex virus thymidine kinase/ganciclovir (HSV-sr39tk/GCV) system is a well-established prodrug system used in cancer gene therapy. However, this system is currently not effective enough to eradicate malignant tumors completely. This study aimed to evaluate whether co-expression of interleukin-3 (IL-3) could enhance the anti-tumor activity of HSV-sr39tk/GCV prodrug gene therapy usin...

The UL97-encoded protein kinase (pUL97) of human cytomegalovirus (HCMV) plays a critical role in the control of virus replication. Deletion of the UL97 gene results in a drastic reduction in the replication efficiency. Although the exact function of pUL97 remains unclear and its sensitivity to specific inhibitors is speculative, protein kinase inhibitors of the indolocarbazole class are effecti...

BACKGROUND Gene therapy is a novel approach for the treatment of cancers, and tumours disseminated in the peritoneal cavity are suitable for in situ delivery of a therapeutic gene. AIMS The efficacy of a therapy combining a suicide gene (herpes simplex virus type I thymidine kinase (HSV-TK)) and cytokine genes was investigated in a model of peritoneal carcinomatosis induced by colon carcinoma...

Twenty 70-year-old longleaf pine trees from a spacing, thinning, and pruning study were harvested, from which samples were analyzed for gross calorific value (GCV). A strong correlation was found between GCV and extractive contents for the unextracted wood samples. Although lignin content should impact GCV, no correlation was found between the variation in GCV with lignin content for the extrac...

Linear parametric regression models of fMRI time series have correlated residuals. One approach to address this problem is to condition the autocorrelation structure by temporal smoothing. Smoothing splines with the degree of smoothing selected by generalized cross-validation (GCV-spline) provide a method to find an optimal smoother for an fMRI time series. The purpose of this study was to dete...

It is thought that gene conversion (GCV) and somatic hypermutation (SHM) of immunoglobulin (Ig) genes occur in two steps: the generation of uracils in DNA by activation-induced cytidine deaminase, followed by their subsequent repair by various DNA repair pathways to generate sequence-diversified products. It is not known how either of the two steps is targeted specifically to Ig loci. Because o...

The prognosis of patients with metastatic gastric cancer, particularly peritoneal carcinomatosis, remains poor despite intensive interventions. Gene therapy and hyperthermia can be promising strategies for such advanced disease. The study was conducted to explore the possible effective therapeutic approach of suicide gene therapy with herpes simplex virus thymidine kinase (HSV-tk) in combinatio...

Administration of donor T cells expressing the herpes simplex-thymidine kinase (HS-tk) with a hematopoietic stem cell (HSC) transplantation could allow, if graft-versus-host disease (GVHD) was to occur, a selective in vivo depletion of these T cells by the use of ganciclovir (GCV). The study evaluates the feasibility of such an approach. Escalating numbers of donor HS-tk-expressing CD3(+) gene-...