The herpes simplex virus thymidine kinase gene type 1 (HSV-Tk) ganciclovir (GCV) system is a novel therapeutic strategy for the modulation of graft-versus-host disease (GVHD), a major complication of allogeneic stem cell transplantation (allo-SCT). Retroviral-mediated gene transfer of the HSV-Tk gene into donor T lymphocytes before allo-SCT may allow their in vivo selective depletion after trea...

The presence of contaminating tumor cells in autologous bone marrow or peripheral blood stem cell (PB-SC) preparations increase the likelihood of relapse in women receiving transplants for metastatic breast cancer. We describe a new technique for purging breast cancer cells (BCCs) that combines two independent strategies: (a) the specific enrichment of CD34+ progenitor stem cells by magnetic an...

Herpes simplex virus-thymidine kinase/ganciclovir (HSV-TK/GCV) therapy is one of the most promising therapeutic strategies for the treatment of cholangiocarcinoma, which is the second most common hepatobiliary cancer. The aim of the present study was to evaluate the enhanced therapeutic effects of HSV-TK/GCV with gemcitabine on cholangiocarcinoma. QBC939 cholangiocarcinoma cells and mouse model...

The immunosuppressive agent mycophenolate mofetil (MMF) has been approved for use in kidney transplant recipients and may thus be used concomitantly for the treatment of intercurrent herpesvirus infections with drugs such as acyclovir (ACV), ganciclovir (GCV), and penciclovir (PCV). We found that MMF and its parent compound mycophenolic acid (at concentrations that are attainable in plasma) str...

Recently, suicide gene therapy using the herpes simplex virus thymidine kinase (HSVtk) gene followed by ganciclovir (GCV) administration was evaluated for the treatment of cancer. The purpose of this study was to investigate the effectiveness of suicide gene therapy using the replication-deficient recombinant adenovirus vector for human oral squamous carcinoma cell lines. To evaluate transducti...

Embryonic stem cells (ES) and induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells represent promising tools for cell-based therapies and regenerative medicine. Nevertheless, implantation of ES cell derived differentiated cells holds the risk of teratoma formation due to residual undifferentiated cells. In order to tackle this problem, we used pluripotent stem cells consisting of ES and iPS cells of mouse gene...

BACKGROUND The aim of this study was to identify the ECG features that might differentiate between anterior interventricular vein (AIV) and distal great cardiac vein (d-GCV) outflow tract-ventricular arrhythmias (OT-VAs). METHODSANDRESULTS Radiofrequency catheter ablation was performed in 13 of 375 patients (3.5%) for AIV or d-GCV OT-VAs. We grouped the 13 patients by the origin, d-GCV (n=9) ...

We previously reported a transgenic mouse model expressing herpesvirus thymidine kinase (TK) gene under the control of a 2.3-kilobase fragment of the rat collagen 1 type I promoter (Col2.3 TK). This construct confers lineage-specific expression in developing osteoblasts, allowing the conditional ablation of osteoblast lineage after treatment with ganciclovir (GCV). After GCV treatment these mic...

The constant presence of the viral genome in Epstein-Barr virus (EBV)-associated gastric cancers (EBVaGCs) suggests the applicability of novel EBV-targeted therapies. The antiviral nucleoside drug, ganciclovir (GCV), is effective only in the context of the viral lytic cycle in the presence of EBV-encoded thymidine kinase (TK)/protein kinase (PK) expression. In this study, screening of the Johns...

Inverse problems are usually ill-posed in such a way that it is necessary to use some method to reduce their deficiencies. The method that we choose is the regularization by derivative matrices. There is a crucial problem in regularization, which is the selection of the regularization parameter λ. In this work we use generalized cross validation (GCV) as a tool for the selection of λ. GCV was p...