Current Pharmaceutical Biotechnology - Volume 2, Issue 1, 2001

Nonviral gene therapy has significant clinical potential, yet itstherapeutic utility has been hindered by low transfection efficiency due to acombination of extracellular and intracellular barriers. Recent developments informulation and delivery methodology have allowed a number of advances towardhigh efficiency gene delivery to various cell types and organs. In particular, theextracellular and intracellular pharmaco Read More

Recombinant Fv-immunotoxins are a new class of biologic anticanceragents composed of a recombinant antibody fragment linked to a very potentbacterial toxin. These potent molecules are designed to specifically bind and killcancer cells that express a specific target antigen on their cell surface. RecombinantFv-immunotoxins are an excellent example for the concept of rational drug design.They combine the progress Read More

Vaccination has been one of the most successful and cost-effective healthinterventions ever employed. One disease (smallpox) has been eradicated, another(poliomyelitis) should disappear early in the new millennium and a third (measles)should follow shortly after. Conventional vaccines usually depend on one of threedevelopment processes, attenuation of virulent organisms (by passage in cell cultureand(slash) Read More

Small heat shock proteins (sHSPs) belong to a family of 12- to 43-kDaproteins that are ubiquitous and are largely conserved in amino acid sequence among allorganisms. The principal heat-shock proteins that have chaperone activity (that is, they protectnewly made proteins from misfolding) belong to five conserved classes HSP100,HSP90, HSP70, HSP60 and the small heat-shock proteins (sHSPs). The sHSPs (which include alp Read More