Current Pharmaceutical Biotechnology - Volume 16, Issue 10, 2015

Diabetes mellitus has been a threat to humans for many years. Amongst the different diabetes types, type 2 diabetes mellitus is the most common, and this is due to drastic changes in human lifestyle such as lack of exercise, stressful life and so on. There are a large number of conventional treatment methods available for type 2 diabetes mellitus. However, most of these methods are curative and are only applicable when th Read More

A large number of liposome-based non-viral gene and siRNA delivery systems include monovalent cholesteryl cytofectins with acyclic head groups in their formulations. Progress in their clinical development has, however, been hampered by relatively low transfection efficiencies. Structural differences between members of this class of cationic amphiphiles are located primarily in their linker, spacer and head group regions. T Read More

After several decades of immunization against hepatitis B virus, the question still remains whether a new vaccine could avoid the limitations of the current vaccine similar to those associated with its injectable form or ineffectiveness on chronic hepatitis B disease. A hypothesis to overcome first limitation is the development of an intranasal vaccine, self-administered, able to achieve not only systemic immunity, but also sIgA on th Read More

Oxidative stress plays a key role in the pathogenesis of different serious chronic diseases such as cancer, diabetes, cardiovascular and neurodegenerative disorders, etc. Recent research has been focused on the beneficial role of dietary antioxidants against oxidative stress both under in vitro and in vivo conditions. Theobroma cacao L. (cacao tree) is an evergreen tree which is native to South America. It is a plan Read More

For a long time, researchers have attempted to replace human plasmaderived immunoglobulin against HBV with recombinant HBV antibodies for therapeutic purposes, but failed to develop the products. One of the reasons may be lack of high throughput antibody screening tool. In this study, we screened an antibody library from immunized subjects by a powerful bacterial display technology. The capacity of the ScFv library w Read More

Interferon α2b (IFN α2b) is the first cytokine, which has been approved by FDA to treat chronic hepatitis B. However, it has no organ or tissue selectivity effect, and will be rapidly cleared out in the liver after the administration treatment. In our previous study, a novel liver-targeting fusion interferon (IFN-CSP) was constructed by recombining human IFN α2b with a CSP region I-plus peptide. The purpose of this study is to co Read More

The aim of the study was an assessment of the antioxidant, antifungal and cytotoxic potentials of L. betulinus/ and T. hirsuta/ mycelia extracts and the effect of selenium on these activities. Extracts of L. betulinus/ were twice as efficient in DPPH• scavenging as those of T. hirsuta/. The phenol content in Se-enriched L. betulinus/ extracts was higher than in non-enriched extracts, in contrast to the effect of Se-enrichment on T. hi Read More

Single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWNT) have been widely explored as carriers for drug delivery because of their large surface area, high near-infrared absorption coefficient and facile transport through cellular membranes. In this study, Lysine (Lys) modified SWNT-liposomes conjugate loaded with doxorubicin (DOX) was designed to enhance the targeted drug delivery and antitumor effect. The conjugate (DOX-Lys/SWNT- Read More