Drug resistance to sorafenib is common in patients with hepatocellular carcinoma(HCC). We examined the effects of a combination of sorafenib and fluvastatin on HCC using in vitro and in vivo models. The dual treatment induced apoptosis and reduced cellular viability in HCC more effectively than either drug alone. The combination treatment also inhibited activation of hepatic stellate cells, whe...

The enzyme 3-hydroxy-3-methylglutaryl-CoA (HMG-CoA) reductase is crucial to insect development and reproduction, as revealed by the sterilising properties of some specific inhibitors of it. In the present paper, we study the sterilising effects of a number of HMG-CoA reductase inhibitors on the German cockroach, Blattella germanica (L). The inhibitors tested were naringenin, lovastatin, mevasta...

Statins were derived from Penicillium citrinium in 1976 by Endo and his colleagues. Brown et al7 showed that they act by inhibiting HMG-CoA reductase. The first studied statin was compactin which was renamed mevastatin. Lovastatin became the first statin to be approved for human use. Pravastatin and simvastatin are chemically modified derivatives of lovastatin. Atorvastatin, fluvastatin and cer...

Sir, We recently read a paper published by Hurst et al. who investigated incidence, predictors and associated outcomes of rhabdomyolysis (RM) in renal transplant recipients [1]. RM is rarely reported in this population, with most of the cases occurring in patients treated with calcineurin inhibitors in combination with statins. In a retrospective cohort of 20 366 renal transplant recipients, th...

BACKGROUND Statins reduce cardiovascular events and progression of carotid intima-media thickness (IMT). beta-Blockers are also known to reduce cardiovascular events, but less is known about their effects on carotid IMT. METHODS AND RESULTS We conducted a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled, single-center trial to compare the effects of low-dose metoprolol CR/XL (25 mg once daily) an...

We develop a semi-supervised pattern learning method to extract drug-gene relationships from free text. Central to our approach is the observation that: the semantic relationship between a drug and a gene can be expressed in many different ways due to the flexibility and expressive nature of human natural language. However, these patterns are not randomly distributed and there are predominant p...

BACKGROUND Rats fed a high-fat and high-sucrose (HF) diet develop hepatic steatosis and hyperlipidemia. There are several reports that a change in nutritional status affects hepatic levels of drug-metabolizing enzymes. Synthetic inulin is a dietary component that completely evades glucide digestion. Supplementing a HF diet with inulin ameliorates hypertriglycemia and hepatic steatosis, but not ...

BACKGROUND Candidate compounds being developed to treat chronic obstructive pulmonary disease are typically assessed using either acute or chronic mouse smoking models; however, in both systems compounds have almost always been administered prophylactically. Our aim was to determine whether the prophylactic effects of reference anti-inflammatory compounds in acute mouse smoking models reflected...