Background: Herbal compounds are attractive anticancer candidates due to their low toxicity. Previous studies have demonstrated that Hibiscus sabdariffa is promising as an anticancer agent against several cancer types; however, its potential therapeutic role in breast cancer remains to be investigated. Materials and Methods: In the present study, the cytotoxic effects of Hibiscus sabdariffa aqu...

BACKGROUND Human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)-infected (HIV+) men are more susceptible to sexually transmitted infections, and may be superinfected by HIV. We hypothesized that HIV induces immune alterations in the foreskin that may impact the subsequent acquisition/clearance of genital coinfections. METHODS Foreskin tissue and blood were obtained from 70 HIV-uninfected and 20 HIV+ men underg...

Background: Re-epithelialization has an important role in skin wound healing. Delays in re-epithelialization are more likely to create the chronic wound. Impaired wound healing leads to a large burden of morbidity and mortality. Current treatments based on the use of autografts, allografts and xenografts, suffer from limitations such as, quantity of donor skin available, donor-site infection, p...

In an attempt to isolate multipotent stem cells from foreskin in a long-term culture, we encountered an interesting phenomenon which was the conversion of the fibroblast dominant condition to epithelial-like tissue formation. However, the basic mechanism(s) which may be involved in this conversion is not clear. This study was designed to evaluate the cells protein secretion activity and examine...

Epithelial cells obtained from normal human urothelium, a cell line derived from a papillary bladder carcinoma, and cells derived from an invasive carcinoma were grown in a serum-free fully defined medium. The interaction between these cell types and normal bladder stromal cells obtained by explant culture in serum were investigated in mixed cultures. These studies showed that normal urothelium...

background: photodynamic therapy (pdt) is a promising therapeutic modality for the treatment of cancer and other diseases. in this study, the epidermoid carcinoma cell line a431 and the normal fibroblasts were used to investigate whether gold nanoparticles (gnps) can induce an increase in cell death during pdt using 5-aminolevulinic acid (5-ala) as a photosensitizer. methods: human fibroblast a...

Abundance and accessibility render skin-derived stem cells an attractive cell source for tissue engineering applications. Toward assessing their utility, the variability of constructs engineered from human dermis-isolated adult stem (hDIAS) cells was examined with respect to different anatomical locations (foreskin, breast, and abdominal skin), both in vitro and in a subcutaneous, athymic mouse...

Establishing a model for in vitro differentiation of human embryonic stem cells (hESCs) towards the germ cell lineage could be used to identify molecular mechanisms behind germ cell differentiation that may help in understanding human infertility. Here, we evaluate whether a lack of exogenous fibroblast growth factor 2 (FGF2) is supporting spontaneous differentiation of hESCs cultured on human ...