细胞技术

Bleomycin has, in the years of developing electrochemotherapy (ECT), proven to be an extremely potent drug for this cancer treatment modality and is also the most frequently applied chemical agent. It is of importance to investigate the pharmacokinetics of bleomycin under normal condit ...

Cancer of the pancreas is currently the fifth leading cause of cancer related deaths with a five year survival of less than 1% In the United States (1). It is one of the most difficult cancers to treat, since it is hard to detect in the early stages. The patients remain asymptomatic until late in the course of the dise ...

Electroporation (also termed electropermeabilization) of muscle tissue has been studied in several contexts. It has been shown that electroporation plays an important role in muscle damage as a result of electrical injury (1,2) and that electroporation of cardiac muscle occurs duri ...

In order to be effective, electrochemotherapy must meet the following two requirements. First, the chemotherapeutic drug must be present around tumor cells, and second, each cell in the tumor must be exposed to an electric field that is above the threshold value for this particular tumor type.

Electrochemotherapy has been developed on the basis of in vitro data showing the huge increase of bleomycin cytotoxicity observed after cell electropermeabilization. Electrochemotherapy has been proven to be highly efficient as a local antitumor treatment on transplanted tu ...

Administering a chemotherapeutic agent in combination with electric fields (electrochemotherapy; ECT) has been shown to be an effective localized treatment for solid tumors (1). The drug used most often in this combination treatment has been bleomycin. ECT has been used successfully ...

In vitro data have shown an increased cytotoxic drug uptake into electropermeabilized cells in suspension, leading to a marked cytotoxicity increase (1). Preclinical experiments were required to demonstrate the in vivo applicability of these observations. Obviously, the most co ...

The first research that focused on the effects of pulsed electric fields on living cells described the phenomena of reversible and irreversible membrane breakdown in an in vitro environment in the 1960s and 1970s (1–6). This early research led to the current understanding that exposing cells ...

Electroporation generally refers to the technique of permeabilizing cell membranes by applying a short and intense electric pulse across a cell, such that the barrier function of the membrane is instantaneously compromised. During such time, genetic materials may travel across the m ...

Chemotherapy is a standard treatment for a wide variety of cancers. However, response rates are usually low. In melanoma, for example, partial response rates range from 20–45 % with complete responses of less than 5% (1–4). The cell membrane can be a significant barrier for agents with an intracellul ...

The major disadvantage of clinically established chemotherapeutic agents is their lack of selectivity for tumor cells. Therefore, for a pronounced antitumor effect, high doses of the chemotherapeutic drugs are needed, which often cause systemic toxicity and severe side effects. S ...

Antitumor electrochemotherapy is a treatment of solid tumors which combines a cytotoxic nonpermeant drug, like bleomycin, with locally delivered permeabilizing electric pulses (1–3). More generally, a new form of vectorization is achieved by the combination of nonpermeant mole ...

The permeability of a cell membrane can be transiently increased locally when an external electric field pulse with an overcritical intensity is applied. A position dependent modulation of the membrane potential difference is induced during the pulse. A local membrane alteration is cr ...

Electropermeabilization of cell plasma membrane is a threshold phenomenon. When a cell is exposed to electric field a spatially dependent transmembrane potential is induced (1). Above a certain threshold value of transmembrane potential permeability of plasma membrane drasti ...

Electroporation (EP) of drugs and genes into cells in vitro became a standard procedure in molecular biology laboratories in the last decade. Numerous protocols aid the researcher in selecting appropriate procedures; commercial instrumentation is readily available and discus ...

The phenomenon of membrane electroporation (ME) methodologically comprises an electric technique to render lipid and lipid-protein membranes porous and permeable, transiently and reversibly, by electric voltage pulses. It is of great practical importance that the primary st ...

The mechanism by which high-voltage pulses transiently disrupt lipid bilayers in cell membranes has been the subject of controversy since electroporation was first observed almost three decades ago. Determining the mechanism by which such pulses permeabilize the complex, multi ...

Human skin is a complex system, providing a formidable obstacle to drug delivery Fig. 1 (1–3). In particular, the stratum corneum (SC) is the primary barrier to transdermal drug delivery. The stratum corneum is made up of corneocytes, which are flattened remnants of cells, surrounded by lipid bilay ...

Dendritic cells (DC) are critical to the induction and regulation of the innate and adaptive immune responses. They have been implicated in the pathogenesis of many autoimmune and chronic inflammatory diseases as well as contributing to the development of tumours by their lack of appropri ...

Dendritic cells (DCs) are key coordinators of the immune response, governing the choice between tolerance and immunity. DCs are professional antigen-presenting cells capable of presenting antigen on MHC molecules and priming CD4 and CD8 T-cell responses. They form a heterogeneous gr ...