Current Medicinal Chemistry - Volume 25, Issue 35, 2018

From the discovery of Endothelial Progenitor Cells (EPC), these bone marrowderived precursors have been placed as crucial mediators of the endothelial repair. Accordingly, altered levels and function of EPC have been found in different scenarios of CV risk. Despite the fact that EPC exhibit important characteristics which support a link of this cell subset with a number of inflammatory and immune networks, little is known on Read More

Background: Cardiovascular (CV) risk stratification is suboptimal if solely based on traditional CV risk factors, since individuals with similar risk profiles could exhibit diverging CV outcomes. Thus, there is a need for new risk factors to be identified. Recent studies emphasize the relevance of the endothelial homeostasis in the control of CV risk, but the clinical relevance of these findings is starting to be appreciated. Gaining ins Read More

Background: Circulating progenitor cells (CPCs) and endothelial progenitor cells (EPCs) are immature cells involved in vascular repair and related to many aspects of macro and microvascular disease. Objective: We aimed to review studies reporting the prognostic role of CPCs/EPCs measurement on development of cardiovascular disease and microangiopathy. Methods and Results: We reviewed the English language Read More

Background: Autologous cell therapy represents a novel treatment option for vascular regeneration in different disease conditions, with experimental and clinical studies indicating a therapeutic potential for proangiogenic cells (PCs), including endothelial progenitor cells, in the treatment of coronary and peripheral artery disease. Objective: To provide a summary of the therapeutic potential of PCs administration Read More

Background: Circulating endothelial cells (CECs), originated form endothelial progenitors (EPCs) are mature cells not associated with vessel walls and detached from the endothelium. Normally, they are present in insignificant amounts in the peripheral blood of healthy individuals. On the other hand, elevated CECs and EPCs levels have been reported in the peripheral blood of patients with different types of cancers and other dis Read More

Background: The ‘epidemic’ diffusion of chronic kidney disease (CKD) needs the development of new therapeutic approaches to slow down the progression to end-stage renal disease. Endothelial Progenitor Cells (EPCs) are promising tools for the treatment of many human diseases as they promote the repair of damaged tissues. They were also suggested as therapy to repair renal tissue after an injury. Strategies using EPCs Read More

Within the last two decades, the field of nanomedicine has not developed as successfully as has widely been hoped for. The main reason for this is the immense complexity of the biological systems, including the physico-chemical properties of the biological fluids as well as the biochemistry and the physiology of living systems. The nanoparticles' physicochemical properties are also highly important. These differ profoundly from t Read More

Background: Nanosafety aims for a solution through the safer design (and re-design) of nanostructured materials, optimizing both performance and safety, by resolving which structural features lead to the desired properties and modifying them to avoid their detrimental effects without losing their desired nanoscale properties in the process. Starting with known toxic NPs, the final aim should be the re-design of such detr Read More

Background: Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a public health priority all over the world. The difficulty of fighting the disease consists mostly in the complexity of symptoms and causes, in the still poor knowledge of its mechanisms and in the existence of a latent, asymptomatic, preclinical stage. Although many drugs are continuously screened in clinical studies for the treatment of Alzheimer's disease, the unexpected lack of patie Read More

In the present review, we describe three hot topics in cancer research such as circulating tumor cells, exosomes, and 3D environment models. The first section is dedicated to microfluidic platforms for detecting circulating tumor cells, including both affinity-based methods that take advantage of antibodies and aptamers, and “label-free” approaches, exploiting cancer cells physical features and, more recently, abnormal cancer m Read More

This review overviews the impact in biomedicine of surface enhanced. Raman scattering motivated by the great potential we believe this technique has. We present the advantages and limitations of this technique relevant to bioanalysis in vitro and in vivo and how this technique goes beyond the state of the art of traditional analytical, labelling and healthcare diagnostic technologies.