Ponatinib in the leukemia world: why a reevaluation is necessary for Philadelphia chromosome-positive patients with T315I mutation.

Strategic drug design is used to meet the needs of numerous diseases for which there is no other recourse. Take the T315I mutation, for example, which occurs in Philadelphia chromosome-positive leukemias and renders all currently available tissue kinase inhibitors useless. The US FDA therefore saw it fit to avail ponatinib, the therapeutic result of careful drug design, to patients based on early data.

Mesenchymal stem cell therapies: the quest for fine-tuning.

Mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) have a vastly unharnessed therapeutic potential with close to 400 studies currently registered on clinicaltrials.gov for evaluation of their clinical promises. While many of these investigations are for immune-mediated disorders, there is no established consensus on how to optimize the immunomodulatory properties of MSCs.

Temporal definition of haematopoietic stem cell niches in a large animal model of in utero stem cell transplantation.

The fetal sheep model has served as a biologically relevant and translational model to study in utero haematopoietic stem cell transplantation (IUHSCT), yet little is known about the ontogeny of the bone marrow (BM) niches in this model. Because the BMmicroenvironment plays a critical role in the outcome of haematopoietic engraftment, we have established the correlation between the fetal-sheep and fetal-human BM niche ontogeny, so that studies addressing the role of niche development at the time of IUHSCT could be accurately performed. Immunofluorescence confocal microscopic analysis of sheep fetal bone from gestational days (gd) 25-68 showed that the BM microenvironment commences development with formation of the vascular niche between 25 and 36 gd in sheep; correlating with the events at 10-11 gestational weeks (gw) in humans.