Current Pharmaceutical Biotechnology - Volume 7, Issue 3, 2006

Translational medicine concerns the elucidation of molecular mechanisms of disease processes, the mapping ofpathological cellular network and identification of potential biochemical targets to develop new drug ("from thebench to bedside and bedside to bench"). Proteomic based approaches are powerful tools with great promise in disease diagnosis and mechanistic profiling oftherapeutic interventions. This special Read More

Cellular signaling lies at the core of cellular behavior, and is central for the understanding of many pathologicconditions. To comprehend how signal transduction is orchestrated at the molecular level remains the ultimate challengefor cell biology. In the last years there has been a revolution in the development of high-throughput methodologies inproteomics and genomics, which have provided extensive knowledge about expre Read More

Discovery of disease specific biomarkers in human body fluids has become an important challenge in clinicalproteomics. Facing the increasing threat of degenerative and disabling diseases like cancer, cardiovascular, neurologicaland inflammatory diseases in large parts of the world' population, there is an urgent need to improve early diagnostics. Inthis review we discuss possibilities and limitations connected to using Read More

Acute myeloid leukemia (AML) is an aggressive hematological malignancy characterized by accumulatingmyeloid precursor cells in the bone marrow, with approximately 2-3 months 50% survival if left untreated. With currenttreatment modalities the five years overall survival hardly exceeds 50%. Cytogenetics and molecular diagnostics guide theclinician to select individualized therapy in certain subsets of AML, achie Read More

Telomeres are specialized structures at the end of human chromosomes. Telomere length decreases with eachcell division, thus, reflecting the mitotic history of somatic cells. Telomerase, the ribonucleoprotein enzyme which main-tains telomeres of eukaryotic chromosomes, is up-regulated in the vast majority of human neoplasia but not in normal so-matic tissues. In contrast to other somatic cells, normal primitive human h Read More

Myeloid malignancies frequently harbor specific mutations in protein tyrosine kinases leading to oncogenic cellsignaling. The most extensively investigated example is chronic myeloid leukemia, where the pathogenic tyrosine kinasefusion protein Bcr-Abl is a successful target for disease control by the specific inhibitor imatinib mesylate. In acute mye-loid leukemia the receptor tyrosine kinase Flt3 is frequently mutated an Read More

The anti-oncogene TP53 is frequently mutated in human cancer, but in hematological malignancies this is arare feature. In acute myeloid leukemia (AML) more than 90% of the patients comprise wild type TP53 in their cancercells, but if TP53 is mutated or deleted the disease is often found to be chemoresistant. In this review we define pro-teomics of the oncogene product p53 as the study of proteins in the p53 regulating signalin Read More

The protein phosphatase inhibiting toxins microcystin and nodularin act rapidly to induce apoptotic cell death.Their inhibitory effect on protein phosphatases 1 and 2A can be utilized as tools to understand the phosphorylation-dependent regulatory mechanism underlying the early stage of apoptosis. The incubation of freshly isolated hepatocyteswith these toxins results in a rapid hyperphosphorylation of cellular proteins bef Read More

The 14-3-3 family of proteins was originally identified in 1967 as simply an abundant brain protein. However ittook almost 25 years before the ubiquitous role of 14-3-3 in cell biology was recognized when it was found to interactwith several signalling and proto-oncogene proteins. Subsequently 14-3-3 proteins were the first protein recognized tobind a discrete phosphoserine/threonine-binding motifs. In mammals t Read More