PURPOSE To determine whether long-term brimonidine (BRI) treatment prevents the hyperglycemia-induced increase in vitreoretinal vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) expression and breakdown of the blood-retinal barrier (BRB) in streptozotocin (STZ)-induced diabetic rats. METHODS Brown Norway/Long-Evans rats were divided into three groups with similar distributions of blood glucose and bo...

Research in the laboratory has shown that lyophilized black raspberries (BRB) significantly inhibit N-nitrosomethylbenzylamine (NMBA)-induced esophageal squamous cell carcinogenesis in rats. The objective of the present study is to characterize the underlying mechanism(s) of anti-cancer action of BRB in this preclinical animal model focusing on oxidative stress and its related oncogenic signali...

Retinal diseases are the main causes of blindness in the Western world. Diabetic retinopathy and age-related macular degeneration continue to increase in prevalence and as main causes of vision loss. Intravitreal anti-VEGF and steroid injections have raised new expectations for their successful treatment. These agents act by stabilizing the blood-retinal barrier (BRB). Our group defined the BRB...

The explosion of available microarray data on human cancer increases the urgency for developing methods for effectively sharing this data among clinical cancer investigators. Lack of a smooth interface between the databases and statistical analysis tools limits the potential benefits of sharing the publicly available microarray data. To facilitate the efficient sharing and use of publicly avail...

Retinal diseases are the main causes of blindness in the Western world. Diabetic retinopathy and age-related macular degeneration continue to increase in prevalence and as main causes of vision loss. Intravitreal anti-VEGF and steroid injections have raised new expectations for their successful treatment. These agents act by stabilizing the blood-retinal barrier (BRB). Our group defined the BRB...

SUMMARY Non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) is an increasingly used algorithm for the analysis of complex high-dimensional data. BRB-ArrayTools is a widely used software system for the analysis of gene expression data with almost 9000 registered users in over 65 countries. We have developed a NMF analysis plug-in in BRB-ArrayTools for unsupervised sample clustering of microarray gene expres...

Retinal diseases are the main causes of blindness in the Western world. Diabetic retinopathy and age-related macular degeneration continue to increase in prevalence and as main causes of vision loss. Intravitreal anti-VEGF and steroid injections have raised new expectations for their successful treatment. These agents act by stabilizing the blood-retinal barrier (BRB). Our group defined the BRB...

This study proposes a class of hybrid isolation systems constructed by combining Buckling Restrained Braces (BRBs) with Rubber Bearings (RBs) or Lead (LRBs) for mitigating the seismic responses in bearing-supported bridges under strong earthquakes. Firstly, two different (RB–BRB and LRB–BRB) were preliminarily designed based on energy-conservation concept case bridge Y-shaped piers, which can m...

PURPOSE The objectives of this study were to characterize the differential potency of two major VEGF isoforms, VEGF(120) and VEGF(164), for inducing leukocyte stasis (leukostasis) within the retinal vasculature and blood-retinal barrier (BRB) breakdown and to determine whether endogenous VEGF(164) mediates retinal leukostasis and BRB breakdown in early and established diabetes. METHODS Retina...

Ulcerative colitis (UC) is a chronic inflammatory disease of the colonic mucosa that can dramatically increase the risk of colon cancers. In the present study, we evaluated the effects of a dietary intervention of freeze-dried black raspberries (BRB), a natural food product with antioxidant and anti-inflammatory bioactivities, on disease severity in an experimental mouse model of UC using 3% de...