Publications by authors named "Delphine Pagan"
Cytidine deaminase (CDA) converts cytidine and deoxycytidine into uridine and deoxyuridine as part of the pyrimidine salvage pathway. Elevated levels of CDA are found in pancreatic tumors and associated with chemoresistance. Recent evidence suggests that CDA has additional functions in cancer cell biology.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSmall GTPases are highly regulated proteins that control essential signaling pathways through the activity of their effector proteins. Among the RHOA subfamily, RHOB regulates peculiar functions that could be associated with the control of the endocytic trafficking of signaling proteins. Here, we used an optimized assay based on tripartite split-GFP complementation to localize GTPase-effector complexes with high-resolution.
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- Toll-like receptors (TLRs), especially TLR7, play a crucial role in the immune response and have potential implications for pancreatic cancer treatment, a difficult-to-target disease.
- In laboratory studies, TLR7 ligands effectively inhibited cancer cell growth and induced cell death, while in animal models, they delayed tumor growth in immunodeficient mice but accelerated it in immunocompetent mice.
- The research highlights the complex effects of TLR7 agonists, suggesting they can both help and hinder cancer progression, thereby raising concerns about their therapeutic use in treating pancreatic cancer.
Article Synopsis
- PDAC patients often have hidden micro-metastases that aren't detected, highlighting the need for more research into their progression.
- A study aimed to find gene signatures that differentiate localized PDAC from metastatic forms and used circulating cell-free DNA (cfDNA) as a potential early biomarker for these micro-metastases.
- Key findings indicated that the PI3K pathway, particularly the PI3Kα activation signature, is linked to PDAC aggression, and inhibiting PI3Kα can reduce metastatic behavior by affecting lipid messenger levels and preventing the recruitment of supportive immune cells in the tumor environment.
Blue light is an identified risk factor for age-related macular degeneration (AMD). The production of vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF), leading to neovascularization, is a major complication of the wet form of this disease. We investigated how blue light affects VEGF expression and secretion using A2E-loaded retinal pigment epithelium (RPE) cells, a cell model of AMD.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAims: Blue light is an identified risk factor for age-related macular degeneration (AMD). We investigated oxidative stress markers and mitochondrial changes in A2E-loaded retinal pigment epithelium cells under the blue-green part of the solar spectrum that reaches the retina to better understand the mechanisms underlying light-elicited toxicity.
Results: Primary retinal pigment epithelium cells were loaded with a retinal photosensitizer, AE2, to mimic aging.
Inherited retinal degenerations are blinding diseases characterized by the loss of photoreceptors. Their extreme genetic heterogeneity complicates treatment by gene therapy. This has motivated broader strategies for transplantation of healthy retinal pigmented epithelium to protect photoreceptors independently of the gene causing the disease.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFTo investigate the complexity of alternative splicing in the retina, we sequenced and analyzed a total of 115,706 clones from normalized cDNA libraries from mouse neural retina (66,217) and rat retinal pigmented epithelium (49,489). Based upon clustering the cDNAs and mapping them with their respective genomes, the estimated numbers of genes were 9,134 for the mouse neural retina and 12,050 for the rat retinal pigmented epithelium libraries. This unique collection of retinal of messenger RNAs is maintained and accessible through a web-base server to the whole community of retinal biologists for further functional characterization.
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