NGO Information
16 years ago
Sunday, March 29, 2009
Applied biotech- Gene expression profiling
Breast cancer patients with the same stage of disease can have markedly different treatment responses and overall outcome. The strongest predictors for metastases (for example, lymph node status and histological grade) fail to classify accurately breast tumours according to their clinical behaviour. Chemotherapy or hormonal therapy reduces the risk of distant metastases by approximately one-third; however, 70-80% of patients receiving this treatment would have survived without it. None of the signatures of breast cancer gene expression reported to date allow for patient-tailored therapy strategies. Here we used DNA microarray analysis on primary breast tumours of 117 young patients, and applied supervised classification to identify a gene expression signature strongly predictive of a short interval to distant metastases ('poor prognosis' signature) in patients without tumour cells in local lymph nodes at diagnosis (lymph node negative). In addition, we established a signature that identifies tumours of BRCA1 carriers. The poor prognosis signature consists of genes regulating cell cycle, invasion, metastasis and angiogenesis. This gene expression profile will outperform all currently used clinical parameters in predicting disease outcome. Our findings provide a strategy to select patients who would benefit from adjuvant therapy.
Applied biotech- Ex vivo gene therapy
Gene expression profiling in genomic medicine... Ex vivo gene therapy (from Nature)
An ex vivo approach to gene therapy for familial hypercholesterolaemia (FH) has been developed in which the recipient is transplanted with autologous hepatocytes that are genetically corrected with recombinant retroviruses carrying the LDL receptor. We describe the treatment of a 29 year old woman with homozygous FH by ex vivo gene therapy directed to liver. She tolerated the procedures well and in situ hybridization of liver tissue four months after therapy revealed evidence for engraftment of transgene expressing cells. The patient's LDL/HDL ratio declined from 10−13 before gene therapy to 5−8 following gene therapy, improvements which have remained stable for the duration of the treatment (18 months). This represents the first report of human gene therapy in which stable correction of a therapeutic endpoint has been achieved.
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Applied Biotech: Microbes in industry - Biosurfactants
ABSTRACT
Biosurfactants (Microbial Surface Active Agents) have become recently an important product of biotechnology for industrial and medical applications. The reason for their popularity, as high value microbial products, is primarily in their specific action, low toxicity, relative ease of preparation and widespread applicaility. They can be used as emulsifiers, de-emulsifiers, wetting agents, spreading agents, foaming agents, functional food ingredients and detergents in various industrial sectors such as . Petroleum and Petrochemicals, Organic Chemicals, Foods and Beverages, Cosmetics and Pharmaceuticals, Mining and Metallurgy, Agrochemicals and Fertilizers, Environmental Control and Management, and many others.
Thursday, March 26, 2009
Monday, March 23, 2009
Monoclonal Antibodies
Monoclonal antibodies (mAb or moAb) are monospecific antibodies that are identical because they are produced by one type of immune cellthat are all clones of a single parent cell. Given (almost) any substance, it is possible to create monoclonal antibodies that specifically bind to that substance; they can then serve to detect or purify that substance. This has become an important tool in biochemistry, molecular biology andmedicine. When used as medications, the generic name ends in -mab (see "Nomenclature of monoclonal antibodies").
LINKS:
A very nice animated link -
http://www.sumanasinc.com/webcontent/animations/content/monoclonalantibodies.html
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