Heparin is a widely used anticoagulant. Because of its negative charge, it forms complexes with positively charged platelet factor 4 (PF4). This can induce anti-PF4/heparin IgG Abs. Resulting immune complexes activate platelets, leading to the prothrombotic adverse drug reaction heparin-induced thrombocytopenia (HIT). HIT requires treatment with alternative anticoagulants. Approved for HIT are ...

background: dendritic cells (dc) induce tumor or pathogen-specific t cell responses in humans. several laboratories have developed culture systems, including maturation factors for human dc from peripheral blood monocytes. we comprehensively compared standard maturation stimulus, an autologous monocyte-conditioned medium (mcm), with heparin for their ability to promote uniformly mature dc that ...

Epidermal growth factor (EGF) receptors (ErbB) and EGF family members represent promising targets for cancer therapy. Heparin-binding EGF (HB-EGF) is a member of the EGF family and is an important target for therapy in some types of human cancers. Processing of HB-EGF by proprotein convertases, and successively, by ADAM family proteases, generates a soluble growth factor that requires heparin a...

Heparin is a widely used anticoagulant. Because of its negative charge, it forms complexes with positively charged platelet factor 4 (PF4). This can induce anti-PF4/heparin IgG Abs. Resulting immune complexes activate platelets, leading to the prothrombotic adverse drug reaction heparin-induced thrombocytopenia (HIT). HIT requires treatment with alternative anticoagulants. Approved for HIT are ...

Specific binding of the anticoagulants heparin and antithrombin III to the blood clotting cascade factor human thrombin was recorded as a function of time with a Love-wave biosensor array consisting of five sensor elements. Two of the sensor elements were used as references. Three sensor elements were coated with RNA or DNA aptamers for specific binding of human thrombin. The affinity between t...

.................................................................................................................vii LIST OF TABLES ....................................................................................................... xiv LIST OF FIGURES ....................................................................................................... xv CHAPTER 1. BACKGROUND ON HEPARIN A...

The bone morphogenetic protein 6 (BMP6) is a crucial inducer of hepcidin, the peptide hormone that regulates iron availability in our body. Hepcidin expression influenced by hepatic heparan sulfate (HS) and heparin administration, suggesting BMP6 interaction with heparin/HS. BMP2/4 subfamily has been deeply characterized to have N-terminal heparin/HS binding domain (HBD), whose basic residues c...

Pleotrophin (PTN), a secretory growth factor, is also known as heparin affinity regulatory peptide (Laaroubi et al., 1995), heparin binding growth associated molecule (Hampton et al., 1992), heparin binding growth factor-8 (Milner et al., 1989), and heprin binding neutrophic factor (Kovesdi et al., 1990), due to its high affinity to heparin. PTN shares 50% homogeneous amino acid sequenc with mi...

In this study, we examined in detail the interaction of platelet factor-4 (PF-4) with fibroblast growth factor-2 (FGF-2) and vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) and the effect of PF-4-derived synthetic peptides. We show that a peptide between amino acids 47 and 70 that contains the heparin-binding lysine-rich site inhibits FGF-2 or VEGF function. This is based on the following observation...