Apoptosis in megakaryocytes results in the formation of platelets. The role of apoptotic pathways in platelet turnover and in the apoptotic-like changes seen after platelet activation is poorly understood. ABT-263 (Navitoclax), a specific inhibitor of antiapoptotic BCL2 proteins, which is currently being evaluated in clinical trials for the treatment of leukemia and other malignancies, induces ...

At present, the therapeutic treatment strategies for patients with hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) remain unsatisfactory, and novel methods are urgently required to treat this disease. Members of the B cell lymphoma (Bcl)-2 family are anti‑apoptotic proteins, which are commonly expressed at high levels in certain HCC tissues and positively correlate with the treatment resistance of patients with...

The Bcl-2 antagonist ABT-737 targets Bcl-2/Bcl-xL, but not Mcl-1, which may confer resistance to this agent in various cancers with high levels of Mcl-1. Here, we showed that the combination of gemcitabine and ABT-737 exhibited synergistic cytotoxicity and induced significant apoptosis in multiple cancer types, including lung, renal, bladder, and prostate cancers. The enhanced apoptosis induced...

Distributed constraint satisfaction problems (DisCSPs) with asymmetric constraints reflect the fact that agents may wish to retain their constraints private. The set of valid pairs of values of every binary constraint is split between the two constrained agents. An asynchronous backtracking algorithm for asymmetric DisCSPs is presented. The new algorithm is based on asynchronous backtracking (A...

ABT-737 targets Bcl-2/Bcl-xL but not Mcl-1, which confers resistance to this novel agent. Here, we summarize recent findings indicating that Mcl-1 represents a critical determinant of ABT-737 sensitivity and resistance, and that Mcl-1 down-regulation by various pharmacologic agents or genetic approaches dramatically increases ABT-737 lethality in diverse malignant cell types. These findings als...

The in vitro activities of ABT-773, azithromycin, erythromycin, and clindamycin were compared by testing 1,223 clinical isolates selected to represent different species and phenotypes. ABT-773 was particularly potent against staphylococci (the MIC at which 90% of the strains tested were inhibited [MIC(90)] was < or =0.06 microg/ml), including all strains that were macrolide resistant but clinda...

The in vitro activities of ABT-773 were evaluated against 324 strains of gram-positive bacteria, including multidrug-resistant Staphylococcus spp. and Enterococcus spp. ABT-773 had lower MIC ranges, MICs at which 50% of isolates are inhibited (MIC(50)s), and MIC(90)s than erythromycin or clindamycin for almost all isolates tested. The MICs of ABT-773 were also lower than those of quinupristin-d...

—A concept for variable block-size transform coding is presented. It is called adaptive block-size transforms (ABT) and was proposed for coding of high resolution and interlaced video in the emerging video coding standard H.264/AVC. The basic idea of inter ABT is to align the block size used for transform coding of the prediction error to the block size used for motion compensation. Intra ABT e...

We assessed the pharmacokinetics and interaction of ABT-773 in 12 volunteers receiving ABT-773 alone or concomitantly with ranitidine or sucralfate. Data for 150 mg of ABT-773 were as follows: the maximum concentration of the drug in plasma (C(max)) was 318 ng/ml, its half-life was 5.66 h, and its area under the plasma concentration-time curve from 0 h to infinity (AUC(0- infinity )) was 1,662 ...

The apoptotic and therapeutic activities of the histone deacetylase inhibitor (HDACi) vorinostat are blocked by overexpresssion of Bcl-2 or Bcl-XL. Herein, we used the small molecule inhibitor ABT737 to restore sensitivity of E -myc lymphomas overexpressing Bcl-2 or Bcl-XL to vorinostat and valproic acid (VPA). Combining low-dose ABT-737 with vorinostat or VPA resulted in synergistic apoptosis ...