UNLABELLED Indirect, noninvasive imaging of therapeutic gene expression based on levels of reporter gene expression is a powerful tool to devise improved therapeutic strategies in cancer gene therapy. The use of bicistronic vectors carrying internal ribosome entry sites (IRESs) allows the coexpression of multiple gene products from the same promoter but leads to considerable attenuation of the ...

The aim of this study was to construct a fusion protein from the cytokine granulocyte/macrophage colony-stimulating factor (GM-CSF) and a single-chain Fv fragment (scFv D29) and to investigate its potential to activate cells of the immune system against neuroblastoma cells expressing neural cell adhesion molecule (NCAM). Mammalian cell expression of the scFv D29-GM-CSF fusion protein was compar...

Although structurally and biochemically similar to the cellular prion (PrP(C)), doppel (Dpl) is unique in its biological functions. There are no reports about any neurodegenerative diseases induced by Dpl. However the artificial expression of Dpl in the PrP-deficient mouse brain causes ataxia with Purkinje cell death. Abundant Dpl proteins have been found in testis and depletion of the Dpl gene...

The exponential increase in available neural data has combined with the exponential growth in computing ("Moore's law") to create new opportunities to understand neural systems at large scale and high detail. The ability to produce large and sophisticated simulations has introduced unique challenges to neuroscientists. Computational models in neuroscience are increasingly broad efforts, often i...

objective(s): to investigate the efficacy of interleukin 11 (il-11) towards the high dose methotrexate (hdmtx)-concurrent rat small intestinal mucositis and its impacts on the proliferation of the human t-lymphoblastic leukemia (cem) cell line. materials and methods:95 wistar rats were randomly divided into five groups, the normal control group (a), the methotrexate (mtx) control group (b), the...

background and objective: the management of apoptotic cell death has been considered as a putative therapeutic strategy for cancer treatment. in the present study we investigated the putative pro-apoptotic effect of allicin, the main garlic organosulfur component with repeatedly claimed chemopreventive potency, on the human adenocarcinoma cell line ht29 as an apoptosis resistant cell line, in v...

the cytotoxicity of the biomaterials is a key issue that should be addressed prior to pre-clinical applications. this study was designed to evaluate and compare the cytotoxixity of two forms of bioactive glasses:nanopowder:andmicropowder. human hgf1-pi53 gingival fibroblast cells were used to evaluate the cytotoxicity of 0.5, 1, 1.5, 2, 5, 10, 15 and 20 mg/ml concentrations of the two bioactive...

background: pattern recognition receptors (prrs) are the main sensors of pathogen and danger signals in innate immunity of which toll like receptors (tlrs) are the most studied ones. the contribution of prrs in cerebral inflammation induced by microbial infection, tissue damage and cancer has not extensively been addressed so far. glioma is the most common tumor of the central nervous system an...

background: interfering with cell proliferation and survival is a critical role for antineoplastic drugs leading to cell death through induction of apoptosis. alternative treatments with herbal extracts offer insights into acute myeloid leukemia (aml) therapy. parthenolide (ptl), an extract from feverfew, induces apoptosis in primary human leukemia stem cells (lscs) and bulk leukemic cell popul...

Protein phosphorylation is the most common post-translational modification that regulates several pivotal functions in cells. Cyclin-dependent kinase 5 (Cdk5) is a proline-directed serine/threonine kinase which is mostly active in the nervous system. It regulates several biological processes such as neuronal migration, cytoskeletal dynamics, axonal guidance and synaptic plasticity among others....