Tumor-specific gene delivery is crucial to achieving successful effects in suicide gene therapy. Carcinoembryonic antigen (CEA) promoter has been widely used for this purpose, but the expression level of tumorspecific promoters such as CEA promoter is generally low. In the previous study, we used the Cre/loxP system and showed that LacZ expression by the CEA promoter was remarkably enhanced and...

background: one of the important aspects of the epidemiologic study of suicide and its related behaviors is the identification of suicide methods. this study aimed to investigate the geographical epidemiology of common methods of suicide and suicide attempts in fars province located in southwestern iran during the years 2010-2013. materials and methods: the present study was conducted on 17,342...

Suicide is a leading cause of mortality and morbidity. Suicide represents a major public health problem based on the fact that there are more than 1 000 000 suicides worldwide and approximately 40 000 in the United States per year. Many people throughout the world have therefore had direct experience with a suicide by having a relative, friend, or acquaintance solve their problems by taking the...

A therapeutic vaccine against minimal residual cancer cells is needed for the treatment of patients with colorectal cancer. Several gene therapy studies have revealed that the combination of a suicide gene and cytokine gene might induce effective antitumor immunity. In this study, we constructed an interleukin (IL)-18 and herpes simplex virus-thymidine kinase (HSV-TK) expression vector driven b...

Suicide gene transfer is the most commonly used cytotoxic approach in cancer gene therapy; however, a successful suicide gene therapy depends on the generation of efficient targeted systemic gene delivery vectors. We recently reported that selective systemic delivery of suicide genes such as herpes simplex virus thymidine kinase (HSVtk) to tumor endothelial cells through a novel targeted adeno-...

We employed Illumina 450 K Infinium microarrays to profile DNA methylation (DNAm) in neuronal nuclei separated by fluorescence-activated sorting from the postmortem orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) of heroin users who died from heroin overdose (N = 37), suicide completers (N = 22) with no evidence of heroin use and from control subjects who did not abuse illicit drugs and died of non-suicide causes (...

p16Ink4a is a potent cell cycle inhibitor engaged to support cell cycle arrest during cellular senescence. However, in tumors carrying mutations in key downstream effectors, p16Ink4a is highly expressed but fails to block cell proliferation. p16Ink4a-overexpressing tumor cells are highly aggressive and no targeted interventions are available. To study the effect of specific therapies, we genera...