Hypertrophy and hyperplasia lead to excess accumulation of smooth muscle in the airways of human asthmatic subjects. However, little is known about mechanisms that might counterbalance these processes, thereby limiting the quantity of smooth muscle in airways. Ligation of Fas on the surface of vascular smooth muscle cells and nonmuscle airway cells can lead to apoptotic cell death. We therefore...

Apoptosis is an active process of programmed cell death. Fas is a cell-surface protein which is expressed on activated lymphocytes and known as CD95, TNFRSF6 or APO-1. Fas-L is ligand of Fas and known as CD95 LG or TNFSF6. Apoptosis or cell death is a result of binding of Fas-L to Fas which is expressed on the surfaces of these cells. Cancer cells escape this binding by overexpression of Fas-L ...

PURPOSE To determine whether the FAS-mediated apoptosis pathway becomes activated in the retina after retinal detachment and to investigate the temporal relationship between the activation of the FAS-pathway and the intrinsic apoptosis pathway involving caspase-9 and cytochrome c. METHODS Experimental retinal detachments were created in Brown-Norway rats by injecting 10% hyaluronic acid into ...

OBJECTIVE To investigate Fas and FasL expression in pancreatic tissues and cultured pancreatic cancer cell lines, and to assess the ability of anti-Fas antibodies to induce apoptosis. SUMMARY BACKGROUND DATA Activation of the Fas receptor by Fas-ligand (FasL) results in apoptosis, and dysregulation of this pathway may contribute to abnormal cell proliferation. METHODS Northern blotting and ...

Objective: Increased fatty acid synthase (FAS) expression is detected in various cancers. It has been demonstrated that the intensity of FAS expression in cancer correlates with clinical outcome. Here, we investigated whether FAS expression in carcinoma of the ampulla of Vater has any relationship to clinical or pathological features. Methods: We studied 32 patients surgically treated for carci...

Fas has originally been described as a member of the death-receptor family, mediating apoptosis upon stimulation by Fas-ligand (FasL). However, Fas expressing human endometrial stromal cells (ESCs) are resistant to Fas-mediated apoptosis. Since the implanting embryo secretes FasL, we examined whether Fas mediates non-apoptotic effects in human ESCs in vitro. ESCs were isolated from hysterectomy...

To investigate the inhibition role of anti-Fas hammerhead ribozyme on fas expression and Fas-mediated apoptosis of CTL cell line CTLL-2 cells, the cDNA of an anti-Fas hammerhead ribozyme was synthesized, its expression plasmid was constructed and transfected into CTLL-2 cells by electroporation. fas expression of CTLL-2 cells was detected by RT-PCR and Western blot. CTLL-2 cell viability was me...

Fas transduces not only apoptotic signals through various pathways but also angiogenic and proinflammatory responses in vivo. Human glioma cells express Fas although sensitivity to Fas-mediated cell death is variable, suggesting that Fas may have functions other than apoptosis in these cells. In this study, we addressed alternative functions of Fas expressed on human gliomas by Fas ligation in ...

Interferon-alpha (IFN-alpha) is an established treatment for chronic myelogenous leukemia (CML) in chronic phase, but the mechanism of its antileukemic activity is not clear. One possible mechanism of action might include the induction of apoptosis, and especially Fas-mediated cell killing may play an important role in the elimination of malignant cells. We investigated Fas receptor (Fas-R) exp...

Avicins, a family of triterpene electrophiles originally identified as potent inhibitors of tumor cell growth, have been shown to be pleiotropic compounds that also possess antioxidant, anti-mutagenic, and anti-inflammatory activities. We previously showed that Jurkat cells, which express a high level of Fas, are very sensitive to treatment with avicins. Thus, we hypothesized that avicins may i...