PURPOSE Long-term antiglaucomatous drug administration may cause irritation, dry eye, allergy, subconjunctival fibrosis, or increased risk of glaucoma surgery failure, potentially due to the preservative benzalkonium chloride (BAK), whose toxic, proinflammatory, and detergent effects have extensively been shown experimentally. We hypothesize that BAK also influences trabecular meshwork (TM) deg...

Immunotherapy with Bacillus Calmette-Guérin (BCG) is clinically established in the treatment of superficial bladder cancer. In our attempt to clarify the underlying immunological mechanism, we could previously show that stimulation of PBMC with BCG leads to the generation of cytotoxic BCG-activated killer (BAK) cells. Among others, these BAK cells as well as lymphokine-activated killer (LAK) ce...

Anoikis is a form of programmed cell death induced in normal epithelial cells by detachment from the extracellular matrix [1] [2] [3]. In epithelial cells of the intestine and other organs, activated rasinduces resistance to anoikis [3] [4], but the actual molecular effectors directly involved in the apoptotic machinery that execute or block anoikis have not yet been identified. Bak, a pro-apop...

Age-related hearing loss (AHL), known as presbycusis, is a universal feature of mammalian aging and is the most common sensory disorder in the elderly population. The molecular mechanisms underlying AHL are unknown, and currently there is no treatment for the disorder. Here we report that C57BL/6J mice with a deletion of the mitochondrial pro-apoptotic gene Bak exhibit reduced age-related apopt...

Curcumin, an active ingredient of turmeric (Curcuma longa), inhibits proliferation and induces apoptosis in cancer cells, but the sequence of events leading to cell death is poorly defined. The objective of this study was to examine the molecular mechanisms by which multidomain pro-apoptotic Bcl-2 family members Bax and Bak regulate curcumin-induced apoptosis using mouse embryonic fibroblasts (...

Apoptosis and proliferation are processes associated with the development and progression of breast cancer. The sensitivity of tumour cells to the induction of apoptosis depends on the balance between pro- and anti-apoptotic proteins. The expression of Bak and Bcl-2 was examined using an immunohistochemical method in 71 primary breast cancers. Furthermore, Bcl-2 and Bak were assessed in the nor...

The Bcl-2 family regulates apoptosis by controlling mitochondrial integrity. To clarify whether its prosurvival members function by sequestering their Bcl-2 homology 3 (BH3)-only ligands or their multidomain relatives Bak and Bax, we analyzed whether four prosurvival proteins differing in their ability to bind specific BH3 peptides or Bak could protect isolated mitochondria. Most BH3 peptides c...