Biotechnology journal
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Biotechnology journal · Apr 2013
ReviewConvergent mechanisms in pluripotent stem cells and cancer: implications for stem cell engineering.
Stem cells and cancer cells share certain characteristics, including the capacity to self-renew, differentiatie, and undergo epithelial-to-mesenchymal transition (EMT). The mechanisms underlying tumorigenesis retain similarities with processes in normal stem cell development. Comprehensive analysis and comparison of cancer cell and stem cell development will advance the study of cancer progression, enabling development of effective strategies for cancer treatment. ⋯ Next, we detail how stem cell engineering is able to mimic in vivo microenvironments. These efforts can help better identify stem cell-cancer cell interactions, elucidated dysregulated pluripotent signaling pathways occurring in cancer, revealed new factors that restrict tumorigenesis and metastasis potential, and reprogrammed cancer cells to a less aggressive phenotype. The potential of stem cell engineering to enhance cancer research is tremendous and may lead to alternative therapeutic options for aggressive cancers.
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Nanobio versus Bionano--what's in a name? This special Issue of Biotechnology Journal includes two sections, one featuring articles on nanobio, the other articles on bionano. The editors of the issue, François Baneyx and Je-Kyun Park, discuss the similarities and differences between the two in their editorial.
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Biotechnology journal · Aug 2012
Revolutionizing medicine in the 21st century through systems approaches.
Personalized medicine is a term for a revolution in medicine that envisions the individual patient as the central focus of healthcare in the future. The term "personalized medicine", however, fails to reflect the enormous dimensionality of this new medicine that will be predictive, preventive, personalized, and participatory-a vision of medicine we have termed P4 medicine. This reflects a paradigm change in how medicine will be practiced that is revolutionary rather than evolutionary. ⋯ Our vision for P4 medicine in 10 years is that each patient will be associated with a virtual data cloud of billions of data points and that we will have the information technology for healthcare to reduce this enormous data dimensionality to simple hypotheses about health and/or disease for each individual. These data will be multi-scale across all levels of biological organization and extremely heterogeneous in type - this enormous amount of data represents a striking signal-to-noise (S/N) challenge. The key to dealing with this S/N challenge is to take a "holistic systems approach" to disease as we will discuss in this article.
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Biotechnology journal · Jun 2012
Historical ArticleHeidelberg-Kyoto partnership bridges life and materials sciences, strengthens bilateral ties.
Coinciding with the 150(th) anniversary of German-Japanese friendship, Kyoto University and Heidelberg University, two universities replete with history and tradition strengthened their close ties at a joint meeting in Heidelberg, Germany, forming the core of a broad collaborative effort between the two countries. This forum article provides a background and overview of the collaborations.
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Biotechnology journal · Nov 2011
Synergistic effects between silibinin and antibiotics on methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus isolated from clinical specimens.
Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) is a dangerous microorganism, and creates serious medical problems. It causes many types of infections in humans and often acquires multi-drug resistance. In this study, silibinin was evaluated against 20 clinical isolates of MRSA, either alone or in combination with ampicillin or oxacillin, using a checkerboard assay. ⋯ The MICs/MBCs for the combination of silibinin plus oxacillin or ampicillin were reduced by ≥4-fold against the MRSA isolates tested, demonstrating a synergistic effect, as defined by a fractional inhibitory concentration index (FICI) of ≤0.5. Furthermore, a time-kill study evaluating the growth of the tested bacteria showed that growth was completely attenuated after 2-5 h of treatment with the 1/2 MIC of silibinin, regardless of whether it was administered alone or with oxacillin (1/2 MIC) or ampicillin (1/2 MIC). In conclusion, silibinin exerted synergistic effects when administered with oxacillin or ampicillin and the antibacterial activity and resistant regulation of silibinin against clinical isolates of MRSA might be useful in controlling MRSA infections.