前沿科技及其它

One of the major limitations of conventional cancer chemotherapy is its lack of selectivity; there is cytotoxicity to both tumor cells and normal cells. Genetic prodrug activation therapy (GPAT) uses transcriptional differences between normal and neoplastic cells to drive the sele ...

Gene therapy of cancer includes strategies for augmentation of immunotherapeutic and chemoterapeutic approaches. These strategies mainly involve ex vivo and in vivo cytokine gene transfer, drug sensitization with genes for prodrug delivery, and the use of drug-resistance genes ...

Despite a high effort in the research of malignant brain tumors, the clinical results in treatment of malignant brain tumors are still very poor. Brain tumors are a major cause of morbidity and mortality in the population. New primary brain tumors develop in 2-4 of 100,000 adults each year (1). Recent ev ...

Heat shock proteins (HSPs) are highly conserved proteins present in every living cell. Many members of the HSP family are essential for cellular functions under physiologic conditions, others are induced by various forms of cellular stress (including sudden increase in temperature) to ...

Gene therapy is defined as the alteration of the genetic material of a cell with resultant benefit to a patient. Gene transfer has two broad categories: one in which a therapeutic gene is delivered to the cells with the aim of treating a disease; and another where a marker gene is delivered to label a cell type to d ...

Hybrid cell vaccination is a novel approach for immunotherapy of cancers by inducing specific antitumor immunity (1 ,2). The hybrid cells are generated by electrofusing autologous tumor cells with allogeneic MHC class II expressing cells such as B lymphocytes. The fused cells are irradi ...

Colorectal adenocarcinoma, with more than 150,000 new cases diagnosed in the United States yearly and approximately 50,000 deaths every year, is a significant public health problem. Despite the emergence of new agents, chemotherapeutic options are of limited efficacy, and novel ther ...

Melanoma is a malignant tumor of neuroectodermal origin with an increasing incidence and mortality. It needs to be detected and eliminated early, because melanoma is characterized by its high resistance to the conventional therapies, including surgery and chemotherapy (1-3). On the ot ...

Gene therapy approaches to cancer treatment have been limited by the ability of the delivery vectors to achieve specific high-level expression within tumor cells or the tumor environment following systemic administration. Numerous physical barriers exist in the delivery of thera ...

Many murine and human tumors contain hypoxic or necrotic regions in which the oxygen tension is abnormally low. For example,50% of primary tumors of the breast, cervix, and head and neck contain areas that are hypoxic. Because hypoxic regions are not present in normal tissue, this provides the pote ...

A great variety of viral and nonviral expression systems has been developed and assessed for their ability to transfer genes into somatic cells. In particular, retroviral and adenoviral mediated gene transfer has been extensively studied and improved at least because of their capabili ...

It is important to analyze to what extent these random or designed mutations abrogate viral replication in normal cells because a tightly controlled vector could be injected at higher doses intratumorally or even systemically. On the other hand, it is also important to analyze to what extent th ...

Gene therapy provides a potentially powerful approach for cancer treatment. One strategy is based on direct transfer of a suicide gene, which encodes enzymes that can activate a prodrug within tumor cells and thereby render the tumor cells sensitive to agents that are otherwise nontoxic to the ...

Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is one of the most common malignancies with poor prognosis worldwide, especially in eastern Asia and Africa (1). Recent advances in delivering genes to mammalian cells stimulate the possibility of gene therapy for human diseases, including cancer gene t ...

During the past several years, particle-mediated delivery techniques have been developed as a nonviral technology for gene transfer (1-7). For mammalian somatic tissues, this technology, popularly known as the gene gun method, has been shown effective for transfection of skin, liver, pa ...

Development of safe and effective technology for delivering functional DNA into cells in an intact organism is crucial to broad applications of gene therapy to human disease. Both viral and nonviral vectors have been developed. Of the technologies currently being studied, liposomal de ...

Direct injection of naked DNA into tissues as a gene-delivery method has been extensively studied for genetic immunization and gene therapy (1). When naked plasmid DNA was used as a negative control while cationic liposomes were studied, it was surprisingly found that direct injection of nak ...

The molecular definition of tumor antigens, costimulatory signals, and the possibility to genetically engineer tumor cells as well as simple protocols for efficient isolation and preparation of dendritic cells (DC) renew the interest in tumor immunotherapy and vaccination, in par ...

Gliomas account for about 60% of all primary CNS tumors; two-thirds of all gliomas comprise the most malignant form, glioblastoma multiforme, or glioma grade IV. Although much progress has been achieved in the treatment of other solid tumors over the last few decades, the median survival of patie ...

Genes-encoding marker proteins, which are easily assayable, are useful to monitor cell lineage, gene expression, or promoter activities. In gene-transfer technology such marker genes allow a direct and simple detection of successfully transduced cells. The detection of marker gene ...