Search results for " enhancement."
showing 10 items of 513 documents
T-cell receptor transfer into human T cells with ecotropic retroviral vectors
2014
Adoptive T-cell transfer for cancer immunotherapy requires genetic modification of T cells with recombinant T-cell receptors (TCRs). Amphotropic retroviral vectors (RVs) used for TCR transduction for this purpose are considered safe in principle. Despite this, TCR-coding and packaging vectors could theoretically recombine to produce replication competent vectors (RCVs), and transduced T-cell preparations must be proven free of RCV. To eliminate the need for RCV testing, we transduced human T cells with ecotropic RVs so potential RCV would be non-infectious for human cells. We show that transfection of synthetic messenger RNA encoding murine cationic amino-acid transporter 1 (mCAT-1), the re…
Gene therapy using IL 12 family members in infection, auto immunity, and cancer.
2009
Interleukin-12 (IL-12) is known for several years to have an essential role in inflammatory responses and innate resistance to infection and cancer. This has been largely attributed to its ability to initiate the differentiation of T-helper-1 (Th1) cells producing interferon-gamma. Recently, two new cytokines, IL-23 and IL-27, with homology to IL-12 were discovered and assigned to the IL-12 family of cytokines. Growing evidence supports a role for IL-23 as key mediator of autoimmune disease regulating the new Th17 subset of CD4+ T cells. IL-27 can have pro- and anti-inflammatory effects, which increase Th1 differentiation, suppress Th2 proliferation, or stimulate cytotoxic T cell activity. …
miRNAs and their potential for use against cancer and other diseases
2007
miRNAs are 19–24 nucleotide long noncoding RNAs found in almost all genetically dissected species, including viruses, plants, nematodes, flies, fish, mice and humans. Rapid advances have been made in understanding their physiological functions, while abnormal patterns of miRNA expression have been found in many disease states, most notably human cancer. It is now clear that miRNAs represent a class of genes with a great potential for use in diagnosis, prognosis and therapy. In this review we will focus on the discoveries that elucidate their crucial role in mammalian diseases, particularly in cancer, and propose that miRNA-based gene therapy might become the potential technology of choice …
Antitumor effect of B16 melanoma cells genetically modified with the angiogenesis inhibitor rnasin.
2001
The growth of new blood vessels is an essential condition for the development of tumors with a diameter greater than 1-2 mm and also for their metastatic dissemination. RNasin, the placental ribonuclease inhibitor, is known to have antiangiogenic activity through the inhibition of angiogenin and basic fibroblast growth factor. Nevertheless, the administration of the recombinant form of a protein poses several limitations; as a result, we have studied the antitumor effect of RNasin in a murine gene therapy model. RNasin cDNA was subcloned into the pcDNA3 expression vector, and the resulting recombinant plasmid was used to transfect the B16 murine melanoma cell line. An RNasin inverted constr…
Translation of genomics-guided RNA-based personalised cancer vaccines: towards the bedside
2014
Cancer is a disease caused by DNA mutations. Cancer therapies targeting defined functional mutations have shown clinical benefit. However, as 95% of the mutations in a tumour are unique to that single patient and only a small number of mutations are shared between patients, the addressed medical need is modest. A rapidly determined patient-specific tumour mutation pattern combined with a flexible mutation-targeting drug platform could generate a mutation-targeting individualised therapy, which would benefit each single patient. Next-generation sequencing enables the rapid identification of somatic mutations in individual tumours (the mutanome). Immunoinformatics enables predictions of mutat…
Transplantation of prodrug-converting neural progenitor cells for brain tumor therapy
2003
Since neural progenitor cells can engraft stably into brain tumors and differentiate along the neuronal and glial line, we tested the hypothesis that transplanted cytosine deaminase (CD)-expressing ST14A cells (an immortalized neural progenitor cell line) can convert locally 5-fluorocytosine (5-FC) into 5-fluorouracil (5-FU) and produce a regression of glioma tumors. ST14A, retrovirally transduced with the E. coli CD gene, showed a strong bystander effect on glioma cells as assessed by in vitro assay. Intracerebral injection of C6 glioma cells generated a rapidly growing tumoral mass. DiI prelabeled ST14A, coinjected into the rat brain with C6 glioma cells, survived in the tumoral mass up t…
Hypoxia and radiation response in human tumors
1996
This study demonstrates by an updated analysis of an ongoing prospective study that tumor oxygenation, as measured with a validated standardized polarographic needle electrode method before treatment, powerfully predicts the prognosis of patients receiving radiotherapy for intermediate and advanced stage cancer of the uterine cervix. First evidence for a host component in tumor oxygenation based on a significant correlation between median pO 2 values determined in normal subcutaneous fatty tissue and in cervical cancer is also presented. Further investigations are necessary to clarify whether tumor hypoxia is just a marker of intrinsic tumor aggressiveness or whether the negative impact of …
Downregulation of RhoB GTPase confers resistance to cisplatin in human larygneal carcinoma cells
2009
Acquired resistance to cisplatin represents a major obstacle to an efficient chemotherapy. We found downregulation of RhoB expression in cisplatin-resistant tumor cell lines from different origin. In cisplatin-resistant laryngeal carcinoma subline overexpression of farnesylated or geranylgeranylated RhoB increased cisplatin-induced cell death, while silencing of RhoB expression diminished sensitivity of parental HEp-2 cells via decreased cellular accumulation of cisplatin. However, since RhoB silencing in additional tumor cell lines did not alter their sensitivity to cisplatin, we can assume that RhoB downregulation does not provide general protective role in cell response to cisplatin. Nev…
Aav-based gene therapy approaches for the treatment of canavan disease
2013
Background: The enzyme Aspartoacylase (ASPA) is normally expressed in oligodendrocytes, the myelin-forming cells in the central nervous system (CNS). ASPA gene mutations cause Canavan Disease (CD), a devastating neurological disorder characterized by psychomotor retardation, and spongiform degeneration of central white matter in affected children. The lack of ASPA leads to the enrichment in its substrate N-acetyl aspartate (NAA) which is a biomarker of CD. With no available treatment and a pathology restricted to the CNS CD has been trialled by gene therapy. However, gene replacement approaches using neurotropic recombinant adeno-associated viral (rAAV) vectors have proved unsuccessful. It …
Going beyond histology. Synchrotron micro-computed tomography as a methodology for biological tissue characterization: from tissue morphology to indi…
2009
Current light microscopic methods such as serial sectioning, confocal microscopy or multiphoton microscopy are severely limited in their ability to analyse rather opaque biological structures in three dimensions, while electron optical methods offer either a good three-dimensional topographic visualization (scanning electron microscopy) or high-resolution imaging of very thin samples (transmission electron microscopy). However, sample preparation commonly results in a significant alteration and the destruction of the three-dimensional integrity of the specimen. Depending on the selected photon energy, the interaction between X-rays and biological matter provides semi-transparency of the spe…