前沿科技及其它

The immediate assessment of response to therapy is most beneficial to ovarian cancer patients. This study shows the correlation of drug-induced caspase activation determined by western blot analysis and by Caspase-Glo™ assay. Our findings demonstrate that the use of the Caspase-Glo™ a ...

Apoptotic markers include proteins from the intrinsic and extrinsic pathways. These cascades include both pro-apoptotic and anti-apoptotic elements. The expression levels of these elements can be assessed by immunohistochemistry (IHC) and can indicate general trends in pro- ve ...

Since the discovery of the key role of cytochrome C in the activation of caspase 9, intense interest has focused on the role of mitochondria in apoptosis/programmed cell death. Mitochondria undergo two major alterations during apoptosis. The first is the permeabilization of the outer mitoc ...

The potential of antibodies as magic bullets for targeting therapeutic drugs or imaging agents has been well-documented and is now an emerging area of molecular medicine. Because antibodies act first by binding to their specific antigens it is easy to envisage that the specific activity of an ...

Monoclonal antibodies (MAbs) have broad therapeutic applications in cancer therapy, prevention and treatment of viral infection, immune suppression, etc. However, many well-characterized MAbs are derived from murine sources, and these antibodies have been shown to induce stro ...

Antibodies have been used extensively for diagnostic applications for decades. Antibodies also can be used to target specific cells or specific molecules to produce agonist, antagonist, or neutralizing activity. Antibody therapies have been applied successfully in the treatme ...

Human monoclonal antibodies (MAbs) are more suitable than MAbs of animal origin for clinical applications because of lower hypersensitivity reactions, less formation of circulating immune complexes, and lower anti-immunoglobulin responses. The classical production of hu ...

The interaction between antigens and antibodies can be viewed as a protein engineering system that was optimized by nature and is capable of recognizing any given molecular entity (antigen). Antigen recognition is conferred to the antibody by a limited number of hypervariable surface lo ...

Antibody libraries expressed on the surface of filamentous phage are proven to be a valuable tool in isolating antibodies specific for a wide variety of antigens (for review, see ref. 1). As it is assumed that the probability of isolating high affinity binders is related to the initial library size (2), ...

The high binding specificity and affinity of antibody molecules is a biological wonder. Because of these properties they have been used as prophylactic, diagnostic, and analytical reagents for almost a century now. Their use as “magic bullets” for targeted therapy was conceived by Ehrlich ...

Ovarian cancer remains a major health problem in the United States and most Western European countries. Despite the availability of several effective chemotherapeutic agents for the treatment of ovarian cancer, survival is still poor. Major problems in ovarian cancer chemotherap ...

Specificity in the immune system is dictated and regulated by specific recognition of peptide/major histocompatibility complex (MHC) complexes by the T cell receptor. Such peptide/MHC complexes are a desirable target for novel approaches in immunotherapy because of their highly r ...

The rapid progress in understanding the molecular biology of cancer cells has made a large impact on the design and development of novel therapeutic strategies.

Cell targeting agents such as antibodies, antibody fragments (sFvs), or growth factors have been conjugated or genetically fused to a variety of plant and bacterial toxins. These targeted therapeutics, termed “immunotoxins,” have been evaluated for their clinical efficacy in the tre ...

Natural killer (NK) cells represent a potent subset of lymphocytes for targeting and lysing tumor cells. In contrast to T lymphocytes, they do not need to be preactivated in vitro because they constitutively express cytolytic functions against a number of different targets (1,2). Their inhe ...

Bispecific antibodies (BsAb) provide an effective means of retargeting cytotoxic effector cells against tumor cells (1). They have mainly been produced using murine hybrid hybridomas (2) or by chemical crosslinking (3,4). However, the immunogenicity of BsAb derived from rodent mono ...

Single chain recombinant antibody fragments can multimerise to provide high binding avidity and unique specificity for target antigens and can be used to replace the parent antibody or Fab derivatives (1). A unique advantage in using bacterial expression systems is the high yield and low co ...

Engineering of antibodies specific for tumor-associated antigens provides great flexibility in improving their properties for eventual use in the clinic, for the detection of cancer, or as a therapeutic. In some instances, murine monoclonal antibodies (MAbs) have been identified w ...

Cellular immunotherapy has attracted increasing interest in genetic modification of immunologically competent cells in order to activate the effector cell after binding to predefined antigen. The chimeric immune-receptor strategy utilizes recombinant receptor molec ...

A large number of new biological drugs in clinical development from the biotechnology industry are based on recombinant antibodies. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has recently approved several of these drugs including reagents against cancer (1,2), transplant rejection (3), ...