The effectiveness of stem cell therapies on health-related quality of life and life expectancy in comparison with conventional supportive medical treatment in patients suffering from end-stage liver disease.

The work presented in this study focuses on evaluating health-related quality of life using the International Short Form 36-Item Health Survey in chronic liver disease patients in Cairo, Egypt, who received either stem cell therapy (SCT) or supportive medical treatment (SMT). Long-term follow-up results for patients who underwent therapy compared with healthy individuals showed that patients who underwent SCT showed marked improvements on all domains of the evaluation, much lower mortality rates, and complete absence of malignancy, compared with patients enrolled in SMT. The authors clearly showed a significant advantage of SCT in chronic liver disease patients compared with SMT.

IG20, in contrast to DENN-SV, (MADD splice variants) suppresses tumor cell survival, and enhances their susceptibility to apoptosis and cancer drugs.

We identified seven putative splice variants of the human IG20 gene. Four variants namely, IG20, MADD, IG20-SV2 and DENN-SV are expressed in human tissues. While DENN-SV is constitutively expressed in all tissues, expression of IG20 appears to be regulated.