The relative contributions of left anterior descending (LAD) and left circumflex (LC) arterial inflow to blood sampled at various points within the great cardiac vein (GCV) and coronary sinus (CS) have been investigated in open-chest dogs. Dissolved helium (He) and hydrogen (H2) were infused into external circuits perfusing the LAD and LC, respectively, and their steady-state concentrations wer...

BACKGROUND To investigate the feasibility of gene therapy in treating Epstein-Barr virus (EBV)-associated cancer by employing the suicide gene, herpes simplex virus thymidine kinase/ganciclovir (HSV-tk/GCV), which uses the signaling pathway through the HIV-long terminal repeat (LTR) gene which is expressed from a nuclear factor-kappaB (NF-kappaB)-binding motif-containing promoter that is regula...

Allogeneic bone marrow transplantation (BMT) is associated with a severe complication--graft-versus-host disease (GVHD). Although effectively preventing GVHD, ex vivo T-lymphocyte marrow depletion unfortunately increases graft rejection and reduces the graft-versus-leukemia (GVL) effect. The ex vivo transfer of the herpes simplex thymidine kinase (HS-tk) suicide gene into T cells before their i...

STUDY QUESTION Is targeted adenovirus vector, Ad-SSTR-RGD-TK (Adenovirus -human somatostatin receptor subtype 2- arginine, glycine and aspartate-thymidine kinase), given in combination with ganciclovir (GCV) against immortalized human leiomyoma cells (HuLM) a potential therapy for uterine fibroids? SUMMARY ANSWER Ad-SSTR-RGD-TK/GCV, a targeted adenovirus, effectively reduces cell growth in Hu...

In this paper we study advantages and limitations of the Generalized Cross Validation (GCV) approach for selecting a regularization parameter in the case of a partially stochastic linear irregular operator equation. The research has been motivated by an inverse problem in epidemiology, where the goal was to reconstruct a time dependent treatment recovery rate for Plasmodium falciparum, the most...

A carcinoembryonic antigen (CEA)-producing human lung cancer cell line (A549), a nonproducing human lung cancer cell line (CADO-LC9), and a human uterine cervical cancer (HeLa) were transfected with the herpes simplex virus thymidine kinase (HSV-TK) gene regulated by 445 nucleotides upstream from the translational start of CEA gene. Fifty % growth inhibitory concentration of ganciclovir (GCV) w...

BACKGROUND Herpes simplex keratitis (HSK) caused by herpes simplex virus 1 (HSV-1), which has high recurrent rate and incidence of severe vision loss, is the leading cause of infectious blindness in the world. The aim was to explore the clinical efficacy of oral ganciclovir (GCV) in the prevention of recurrent HSK. METHODS A multicenter, prospective, randomized, single-blind, and controlled c...

This paper considers optimization of the ridge parameters in generalized ridge regression (GRR) by minimizing a model selection criterion. GRR has a major advantage over ridge regression (RR) in that a solution to the minimization problem for one model selection criterion, i.e., Mallows’ Cp criterion, can be obtained explicitly with GRR, but such a solution for any model selection criteria, e.g...

Suicide gene therapy systems such as the herpes simplex thymidine kinase/ganciclovir system (TK/GCV) may kill cancer cells by apoptosis through as yet undefined mechanisms. Here we show that TK/GCV treatment induces p53 accumulation and increases cell surface expression of CD95 and tumor necrosis factor receptor, which is likely to involve p53-mediated translocation of CD95 to the cell surface....