Dental pulp (DP) can be extracted from child's primary teeth (deciduous), whose loss occurs spontaneously by about 5 to 12 years. Thus, DP presents an easy accessible source of stem cells without ethical concerns. Substantial quantities of stem cells of an excellent quality and at early (2-5) passages are necessary for clinical use, which currently is a problem for use of adult stem cells. Here...

Targeted chemotherapy for hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is impaired by intrinsic and/or acquired drug resistance. Because drugs used in HCC therapy (e.g., anthracyclines or the tyrosine kinase inhibitor sorafenib) are substrates of uptake and/or efflux transporters, variable expression of these transporters at the plasma membrane of tumor cells may contribute to drug resistance and subsequent ...

Regenerative medicine is in need of solid, large animal models as a link between rodents and humans to evaluate the functionality, immunogenicity, and clinical safety of stem cell-derived cell types. The common marmoset (Callithrix jacchus) is an excellent large animal model, genetically close to humans and readily used worldwide in clinical research. Until now, only two groups showed the gener...

In airway epithelia, non-neuronal cholinergic regulations have been described; however, the route for acetylcholine (ACh) release has not been verified. To investigate whether organic cation transporters (OCTs) serve this function, we studied the expression of OCTs in airway epithelia and their capability to translocate ACh. Using immunohistochemistry in rats and humans, OCT1, OCT2, and OCT3 we...

Herein we present a protocol of reprogramming human adult fibroblasts into human induced pluripotent stem cells (hiPSC) using retroviral vectors encoding Oct3/4, Sox2, Klf4 and c-myc (OSKM) in the presence of sodium butyrate (1-3). We used this method to reprogram late passage (>p10) human adult fibroblasts derived from Friedreich's ataxia patient (GM03665, Coriell Repository). The reprogrammin...

The drug-drug interaction (DDI) potential of tyrosine kinase inhibitors (TKI) as interacting drugs via transporter inhibition has not been fully assessed. Here, we estimated the half maximal inhibitory concentration (IC(50)) values for 8 small-molecule TKIs (imatinib, dasatinib, nilotinib, gefitinib, erlotinib, sunitinib, lapatinib, and sorafenib) on [(14)C]metformin transport by human organic ...

The first cell lineage determination in embryos takes place when two cell populations are set apart, each differentiating into the trophectoderm (TE) and inner cell mass (ICM), respectively. It is widely believed that position/polarity cues play a key role in triggering this differentiation, but it remains unclear how extracellular cues are transduced into cell fate determination. Here, we prov...

Reprogramming somatic cells into a pluripotent state brings patient-tailored, ethical controversy-free cellular therapy closer to reality. However, stem cells and cancer cells share many common characteristics; therefore, it is crucial to be able to discriminate between them. We generated two induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC) lines, with NANOG pre-transduction followed by OCT3/4, SOX2, and L...

There is an accumulation of evidence that shows a significant role of cancer stem cells in tumor initiation, proliferation, relapse, and metastasis. Nanog is the most important core transcription marker of stem cells, known by its role in maintaining pluripotency, proliferation, and differentiation. Therefore, this study aimed to examine the role of Nanog in breast cancer cell tamoxifen resista...

OBJECTIVE The introduction of 4 transcription factors-c-MYC, OCT3/4, SOX2, and KLF4--can reprogram somatic cells back to pluripotency. However, some of the factors used are oncogenic, making therapeutic application unfeasible. Although the use of adult stem cells expressing high endogenous levels of some of these factors allows for reprogramming with fewer exogenous genes, such cells are rare a...