The majority of cases liver cancer are discovered late in the disease’s progression, making it third leading cause death globally. Chemotherapy is major treatment choice for advanced stages hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC); however, drug resistance, adverse effects, and high cost problems effective treatment. Isoquercetin (IQ) a dietary flavonoid, which has an anti-proliferative effect against se...

Sirtuin1 (Sirt1), a mammalian homolog of yeast Sir2, deacetylates the tumor suppressor protein p53 and attenuates p53-mediated cell death. Necdin, a p53-interacting protein expressed predominantly in postmitotic neurons, is a melanoma antigen family protein that promotes neuronal differentiation and survival. In mammals, the necdin gene (Ndn) is maternally imprinted, and mutant mice carrying mu...

Overexpression of p53 is found in approximately 50% of human cancers, making it an attractive target antigen for immunotherapy of cancer. Research in this area has thus far primarily focused on p53-specific CTLs. Although these CTLs were shown to be highly effective against p53-overexpressing tumors in vivo, immunological tolerance seems to strongly restrict the spectrum of the p53-specific CTL...

CD40 and CD40 ligand (CD40L) are costimulatory molecules that play a pivotal role in the proinflammatory immune response. Primarily expressed by activated CD4+ T cells, CD40L binds to CD40 on antigen presenting cells (APCs), thereby inducing APC activation. APCs, in turn, prime cytotoxic T lymphocytes (CTLs). Here, two tumor-associated antigen (TAA) animal models, p53-based and GP100-based, wer...

A 60-year-old Japanese man presented to our hospital for further investigation of an elevated serum anti-p53 antibody level. He was diagnosed with colon cancer and the tumour was surgically resected. Histological diagnosis of advanced colon cancer without lymph node involvement or distant metastasis was made. It was noteworthy that both serum carcinoembryonic antigen (CEA) and a fecal occult bl...

Ovarian cancer-associated antigen 12 (OVA12) was first identified in an ovarian carcinoma complementary DNA (cDNA) expression library and has been shown to play an important role in tumor growth. Here, we found that overexpression of OVA12 accelerated tumor growth in different tumor cells, whereas OVA12 depletion was associated with the opposite effect. Moreover, knocking down OVA12 led to a si...

The commonly held view of the tumor suppressor p53 as a regulator of cell proliferation, apoptosis and senescence has expanded greatly in recent years to cover many biological processes as well as external and internal stress responses. Since the discovery over 30 years ago of p53 as a cellular protein that co-precipitates with the large T antigen of Simian Virus SV40, there has been an intertw...

SV40 large T-antigen (T-ag) has been known for decades to inactivate the tumor suppressor p53 by sequestration and additional mechanisms. Our present study revealed that the struggle between p53 and T-ag begins very early in the infection cycle. We found that p53 is activated early after SV40 infection and defends the host against the infection. Using live cell imaging and single cell analyses ...

Pluripotent stem cells (PSCs) deficient for microRNAs (miRNAs), such as Dgcr8-/- or Dicer-/- embryonic stem cells (ESCs), contain no mature miRNA and cannot differentiate into somatic cells. How miRNA deficiency causes differentiation defects remains poorly understood. Here, we report that miR-302 is sufficient to enable neural differentiation of differentiation-incompetent Dgcr8-/- ESCs. Our d...