The concept of therapeutically enhancing the immune system's responsiveness to tumors is long standing. Several cytokines have been investigated in clinical trials for their therapeutic activity in cancer patients. However, substantial side effects and unfavorable pharmacokinetic properties have been a major drawback hampering the administration of therapeutically relevant doses. The use of rec...

The aim of this study was to incorporate a web-assisted program to normal traditional classroom instruction and study about students’ misconceptions in force and motion concepts in physics. The Web-based physics program was incorporated with the traditional lecture. Specifically, 30% of class time was allocated for using this tutorial program, and 70 % of class time was used for normal lecture....

BACKGROUND Current organ-preserving dose-intensified modalities have apparently reached the limit of human tolerance. To optimize the therapeutic ratio, we evaluated the utility of a chemoradioselection strategy for the treatment of advanced hypopharyngeal carcinoma. METHODS Fifty-five patients with advanced hypopharyngeal carcinoma were enrolled in our algorithm-based protocol. After 40 Gy o...

Radiobiological models are essential components of modern radiotherapy. They are increasingly applied to optimize and evaluate the quality of different treatment planning modalities. They are frequently used in designing new radiotherapy clinical trials by estimating the expected therapeutic ratio of new protocols. In radiobiology, the therapeutic ratio is estimated from the expected gain in tu...

Although the options for therapeutic modalities such as chemotherapy and antibiotics have flourished, anticoagulant management has remained stagnant since the first agents were developed during World War II. Traditional anticoagulants widely used to treat thromboembolic disease include heparin-based drugs and warfarin. These drugs are cumbersome to administer. They have a narrow therapeutic win...

BACKGROUND Little is known about the perspectives of psychiatric patients who are perceived as 'difficult' by clinicians. The aim of this paper is to improve understanding of the connections between patients and professionals from patients' point of view. METHODS A Grounded Theory study using interviews with 21 patients from 12 outpatient departments of three mental health care facilities. ...

Cultured human lymphoma cells exposed to adriamycin exhibited extreme sensitivity to the drug. When these cells were exposed to adriamycin for 12 hr, a 5-log kill in terms of reproductive capacity was observed. Furthermore, under these conditions, adriamycin exerted an immediate (interphase) lethal effect on about 60% of the cells. Synchronized cells revealed that the S-G2 boundary region was t...

In a paper by Zimmermann and colleagues in this issue of Arthritis Research & Therapy, results of extended laboratory research with the drug combination of prednisolone and dipyridamole are reported. There seems to be a boost and extension of the glucocorticoid effect by the combination, without a clear increase of adverse effects, potentially allowing the application of lower dosages. However,...

Cytotoxic drugs may have specific effects on oncogenes and their downstream targets. Increase of cancer cell sensitivity due to repression of an oncogene downstream target can be specifically addressed by combined precision chemotherapy, increasing the therapeutic index of chemotherapy and overcoming resistance to highly selective targeted therapies.

In radioimmunotherapy (RIT) with radiolabelled anti-CD66 antibody, the red bone marrow is selectively irradiated. A preceding study, employing a physiologically based pharmacokinetic model, has shown that currently about 50% of the anti-CD66 antibody is accumulated in the red marrow. In this work, the potential improvement of the biodistribution is quantified for other anti-CD66 antibodies with...