Chemotherapeutic agents for cancer are highly toxic to healthy tissues and hence alternative medicine avenues are widely researched. Majority of the recent studies on alternative medicine suggested that Amoora rohituka possesses considerable antitumor and antibacterial properties. In this work, rohituka and chittagonga, fractionated with petroleum ether, dichloromethane, and ethanol, were explo...

One of the major symptoms of diabetes mellitus (DM) is delayed wound healing, which affects large populations of patients worldwide. However, the underlying mechanism behind this illness remains elusive. Skin wound healing requires a series of coordinated processes, including fibroblast cell proliferation and migration. Here, we simulate DM by application of high glucose (HG) in human foreskin ...

Transforming growth factor-fl1 (TGF,i1) initiates a series of signalling events resulting in diverse cellular responses including stimulation of extracellular matrix protein production. In this study we have investigated the role of pertussis toxin-sensitive Gproteins in mediating the effects of TGF/?1 on fibroblast procollagen metabolism. TGF,81 stimulated human fetal lung fibroblast procollag...

The coagulation cascade protease thrombin is a fibroblast mitogen, but the proliferative potential of other coagulation proteases is not known. In this study we show that factor Xa stimulated human fetal lung fibroblast DNA synthesis in a concentration-dependent manner from 1 nM onward with a fourfold increase at 200 nM. The mitogenic effect of factor Xa was confirmed using a colorimetric proli...

Previous results suggested that the cyclooxygenase-2 pathway and prostaglandins might modulate 3T6 fibroblast growth. This study shows the effect of resveratrol on the main elements of arachidonic acid (AA) cascade and 3T6 fibroblast growth. The polyphenol reduced the reactive oxygen species production stimulated by fetal calf serum or platelet-derived growth factor, as well as phospholipase A(...

OBJECTIVES To determine the prevalence of human papillomavirus (HPV) types 6, 11, 16 and 18 in foreskin biopsies from patients with balanitis xerotica obliterans (BXO) and other penile conditions. MATERIALS AND METHODS Foreskin biopsy specimens from 24 patients with penile lesions and 5 control patients were analysed by type-specific polymerase chain reaction (PCR). RESULTS HPV6 or HPV16 we...

The cellular mechanism by which glucocorticoids stimulate phosphatidylcholine biosynthesis has been studied in the fetal rat lung in vivo and in cultured fetal rat lung cells of varying levels of complexity. Administration of dexamethasone to pregnant rats at 18 days gestation resulted in a significant increase in saturated phosphatidylcholine content in fetal lung 24 h after injection. Dexamet...

Ex vivo foreskin models have demonstrated that inner foreskin is more susceptible to HIV-1 infection than outer foreskin. In the present study we characterized the compartition of HIV-1 target cells and quantified these cells in the epidermis and dermis of inner and outer foreskins using immunohistochemistry and flow cytometry. Our data showed that the epidermis of the inner foreskin was more e...