Oncolytic viruses are native or engineered viruses that preferentially replicate in and lyse cancer cells. Selective tumor cell replication is thought to depend on infection of neoplastic cells, which harbor low levels of protein kinase R (PKR) and dysfunctional type I IFN signaling elements. These changes allow more efficient viral replication, and with selected deletion of specific viral gene...

Lymphocytes emigrate from the circulation to target tissues through the microvascular endothelial cell (EC) barrier. During paracellular transmigration cell-cell junctions have been proposed to disengage and provide homophilic and heterophilic interaction surfaces in a zip-like process. However, it is not known whether ECs modulate junction proteins during this process. Here we show that tyrosi...

Oncolytic immunotherapeutics (OIs) are viruses designed to preferentially replicate in and lyse cancer cells, thereby triggering antitumor immunity. Numerous oncolytic platforms are currently in clinical development. Here we review preclinical and clinical experience with Pexa-Vec (pexastimogene devacirepvec, JX-594). Pexa-Vec is derived from a vaccinia vaccine strain that has been engineered t...

It has been shown that glomerular visceral epithelial cells (VEC) proliferate during glomerulogenesis, but differentiated VEC of the fetal kidney do not. It is also recognized that the proliferative capacity of the VEC in mature kidneys is very limited, and according to some investigators, may be completely absent. The basis for this remains unknown. Cell proliferation is controlled by cell cyc...

Vascular endothelial cell (VEC) senescence is considered an early event in the development of atherosclerotic lesions. Stressful stimuli, in particular oxidative stress, have been linked to premature senescence in the vasculature. Foam cells are a major source of reactive oxygen species and may play a role in the induction of VEC senescence; hence, we investigated their involvement in the induc...

Valence topological charge-transfer (CT) indices are applied to the calculation of dipole moments mu. The mu calculated by algebraic and vector semisums of the CT indices are defined. The model is generalized for molecules with heteroatoms and corrected for sp(3)-heteromolecules. The ability of the indices for the description of the molecular charge distribution is established by comparing them...

Little is known about the molecular mechanisms that regulate the organization of vascular lumen. In this paper we show that lumen formation correlates with endothelial polarization. Adherens junctions (AJs) and VE-cadherin (VEC, encoded by CDH5) are required for endothelial apicobasal polarity in vitro and during embryonic development. Silencing of CDH5 gene expression leads to abrogation of en...

We describe the two-sided ideals in the universal enveloping algebras of the Lie algebras of vector fields on the line and the circle which annihilate the tensor density modules. Both of these Lie algebras contain the projective subalgebra, a copy of sl2. The restrictions of the tensor density modules to this subalgebra are duals of Verma modules (of sl2) for Vec(R) and principal series modules...

Malignant and inflammatory tissues sometimes express endogenous retroviruses or their proteins. A highly-conserved sequence from retroviral transmembrane (TM) proteins, termed the "immunosuppressive domain (ID)", is associated with inhibition of immune and inflammatory functions. An octadecapeptide (MN10021) from the ID of retroviral TM protein p15E inhibits in vitro release of pro-inflammatory...

The FDA has approved talimogene laherparepvec, or T-VEC, to treat surgically unresectable skin and lymph node lesions in patients with advanced melanoma. T-VEC is the first oncolytic viral therapy to gain regulatory endorsement, based on data from the OPTiM study.