Lung cancer has emerged as a leading cause of cancer death in the world. Non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) accounts for 75-80% of all lung cancers. Current therapies are ineffective, thus new approaches are needed to improve the therapeutic ratio. Double stranded RNA (dsRNA)-mediated RNA interference (RNAi) has shown promise in gene silencing, the potential of which in developing new methods f...

BACKGROUND: Although lentiviral vectors have been widely used for in vitro and in vivo gene therapy researches, there have been few studies systematically examining various conditions that may affect the determination of the number of viable vector particles in a vector preparation and the use of Multiplicity of Infection (MOI) as a parameter for the prediction of gene transfer events. METHODS:...

Affiliation: Université de Lyon, F69007; Inserm, EVIR, U758, Human Virology Department, F-69007; Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon, F-69007; Université Lyon 1, F-69007, Lyon, France School of Life Sciences, Ecole polytechnique Féderale de Lausanne (EPFL), 1015 Lausanne, Switzerland Hematopoiesis and Gene Therapy Division, Centro de Investigaciones Energéticas, Medioambientales y Tecnológicas and...

Vaccination with dendritic cells (DCs) stimulated with tumor antigens can induce specific cellular immune response that recognizes a high spectrum of tumor antigens. However, the ability of cancer cells to produce immunosuppressive factors drastically decreases the antitumor activity of DCs. The main purpose of the study was to improve the effectiveness of DC-based immunotherapy or chemoimmunot...

The applicability of immunotherapy would be dramatically broadened to a greater number of recipients if direct "off-the-shelf" products could be engineered to engender functionally potent immune responses against true "self"-tumor antigens. This would obviate the need for ex vivo culture of dendritic cells or T cells on a patient-by-patient basis, for example. The carcinoembryonic antigen (CEA)...

colleagues in JCMM [1]. As noted by the authors, mesenchymal stem cells (MSC) enjoy considerable therapeutic potential in regenerative medicine, cell therapy for select genetic diseases and as immunomodulators [2, 3]. Expanding on a prior study that explored the genetic modification of MSC using HIV-1 derived lentiviral vectors, the authors describe a strategy that minimizes the replicative sen...

Leucine-rich repeat-containing 8 (LRRC8) proteins have been identified as putative receptors involved in lymphocyte development and adipocyte differentiation. They remain poorly characterized and no specific function has been assigned to them. There is no consensus on how this family of proteins might function, because homology searches suggest that members of the LRRC8 family act not as plasma...

1 Proteostasis Jeffery W. Kelly, MD Departments of Chemistry and Molecular and Experimental Medicine, and The Skaggs Institute of Chemical Biology, The Scripps Research Institute, La Jolla, CA The chemical information within the polypeptide chain, coand post-translational modifications of the amino acids comprising the protein, such as N-linked glycosylation, and the interactions of the polypep...