Monoclonal antibodies (mAbs) are efficient drugs for treating infectious, inflammatory and cancer diseases. Antibodies secreted by human lymphocytes that have been isolated from either peripheral blood or tissues present the definite interest of being part of the physiological or disease-related response to antigens present in the human body. However, attempts to generate hybridomas with human ...

Epstein-Barr virus (EBV) establishes a life-long infection in humans, with distinct viral latency programs predominating during acute and chronic phases of infection. Only a subset of the EBV latency-associated antigens present during the acute phase of EBV infection are expressed in the latently infected memory B cells that serve as the long-term EBV reservoir. Since the EBV immortalization pr...

The introduction of simian virus 40 large T antigen (SVLT) into human primary cells enables them to proliferate beyond their normal replicative life span. In most cases, this temporary escape from senescence eventually ends in a second proliferative block known as "crisis," during which the cells cease growing or die. Rare immortalization events in which cells escape crisis are frequently corre...

Thiol antioxidants, typified by N-acetyl cysteine, are known to induce p53-dependent apoptosis in transformed mouse embryo fibroblasts but not in normal mouse embryo fibroblasts. We now report that this is also the case for human cells. First, we used an isogenic fibroblast cell lineage exhibiting progressive stages of transformation, from primary derived cells to v-MYC immortalized to tumorige...

The Epstein-Barr virus (EBV) infects most of the human population and persists in B-lymphocytes for the lifetime of the host. During the establishment of latent infection a unique repertoire of genes are expressed. The EBV nuclear antigen EBNA3C is essential for growth transformation of primary B-lymphocytes in vitro. EBNA3C regulates the transcription of a number of viral and cellular genes im...

CDKN2/p16 inhibits the cyclin D/cyclin-dependent kinase complexes that phosphorylate pRb, thus blocking cell cycle progression. We previously reported that p16 levels are low to undetectable in normal human uroepithelial cells (HUCs) and in immortalized uroepithelial cells with functional pRb, whereas p16 levels are markedly elevated in immortal HUCs with altered pRb (T. Yeager et al., Cancer R...

The MYD88 L265P is a recurrent somatic mutation in neoplastic cells from patients with Waldenström Macroglobulinemia (WM). We identified the MYD88 L265P mutation in three individuals from unrelated families, but its presence did not explain the disease segregation within these WM pedigrees. We observed the mutation in these three individuals at high allele fractions in DNA extracted from EBV-im...

Dental follicle cells (DFCs) are the precursor cells of periodontium. Under certain differentiation conditions, DFCs can be induced to differentiate into chondrogenic, osteogenic and adipogenic cells. However, DFCs has limited lifespan in vitro, so it's difficult to harvest enough cells for basic research and translational application. pMPH86 is a piggyBac transposon-mediated vector which conta...