PURPOSE Drug-eluting stents (DES) in percutaneous coronary intervention are more effective in preventing in-stent restenosis compared with bare metal stents (BMS); however, DES may cause late stent thrombosis, which has limited its use. In this study, the functional properties of a newly developed DES (RAP/CS/HEP), in which rapamycin was abluminally-loaded onto a chitosan/heparin coating stent ...

Tetrandrine (TET), a bis-benzylisoquinoline alkaloid isolated from the dried root of Hang-Fang-Chi (Stephania tetrandra S. Moore), is well known to possess activities including antioxidant, anti-inflammation, anti-fibrotic and anticancer. It is used clinically to treat hypertension and silicosis. In the present study, the anti-proliferative and apoptotic effects of TET were evaluated on three d...

Cell migration is one of the key cell functions in physiological and pathological processes, especially in tumor metastasis. However, it is not feasible to monitor the important biochemical molecules produced during cell migrations in situ by conventional cell migration assays. Herein, for the first time a device containing both electrochemical sensing and trans-well cell migration modules was ...

BACKGROUND This study was aimed at evaluating the correlation between Hepatocyte paraffin 1 (Hep par 1) and colorectal cancer. METHODS To this end, 50 intestinal biopsies were analyzed including 10 colorectal polyps with low grade dysplasia, 10 with high grade dysplasia, 10 colorectal adenocarcinomas, 10 specimens of normal ileum and 10 of normal colon mucosa. Tissue sections were immunostain...

We have previously identified three distinctive amino acid sequences from type IV collagen which specifically bound to heparin and also inhibited the binding of heparin to intact type IV collagen. One of these chemically synthesized domains, peptide Hep-I, has the sequence TAGSCLRKFSTM and originates from the a1(noncollagenous [NC1]) chain of type IV collagen (Koliakos, G. G., K. K. Koliakos, L...

Recent studies showed that the visceral information is constantly processed by the brain, thereby potentially influencing cognition. One index of such process is the heartbeat evoked potential (HEP), an ERP component related to the cortical processing of the heartbeat. The HEP is sensitive to a number of factors such as motivation, attention, pain, which are associated with higher levels of aro...

Apparent intrinsic clearance (CL(int,app)) of 7-ethoxycoumarin, phenacetin, propranolol, and midazolam was measured using rat and human liver microsomes and freshly isolated and cryopreserved hepatocytes to determine factors responsible for differences in rates of metabolism in these systems. The cryopreserved and freshly isolated hepatocytes generally provided similar results, although there w...

Human performance and reliability monitoring have become the main issue for many industries since human error ratios cannot be mitigated to the zero level and many accidents, malfunctions, and quality defects are happening due to the human in production systems. Since the human resources implement a different range of tasks, the calculation of human error probability (HEP) is complicated, and s...