High content screening of a kinase-focused library reveals compounds broadly-active against dengue viruses.

Dengue virus is a mosquito-borne flavivirus that has a large impact in global health. It is considered as one of the medically important arboviruses, and developing a preventive or therapeutic solution remains a top priority in the medical and scientific community. Drug discovery programs for potential dengue antivirals have increased dramatically over the last decade, largely in part to the introduction of high-throughput assays.

Magnetic bionanoparticle enhances homing of endothelial progenitor cells in mouse hindlimb ischemia.

Background And Objectives: Poor homing efficiency is one of the major limitations of current stem cell therapy. Magnetic bionanoparticles (MPs) obtained from Magnetospirillum sp. AMB-1 have a lipid bilayer membrane and ferromagnetic properties.

New culture system for human embryonic stem cells: autologous mesenchymal stem cell feeder without exogenous fibroblast growth factor 2.

Human embryonic stem (hES) cells have been successfully maintained using human-cell feeder systems or feeder-free systems. However, despite advances in culture techniques, hES cells require supplementation with fibroblast growth factor 2 (FGF-2), an exogenous stemness factor, which is needed to sustain the authentic undifferentiated status. We developed a new culture system for hES cells; this system does not require supplementation with FGF-2 to obtain hES cells that are suitable for tissue engineering and regenerative medicine.

N-cadherin determines individual variations in the therapeutic efficacy of human umbilical cord blood-derived mesenchymal stem cells in a rat model of myocardial infarction.

In this study, we established and characterized human umbilical cord blood-derived mesenchymal stem cells (hUCB-MSCs) from four different donors. However, the hUCB-MSCs showed remarkable variations in their therapeutic efficacy for repairing rat infarcted myocardium (including the process of angiogenesis) 8 weeks after transplantation. In addition, we observed that the level of vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) is correlated with the therapeutic efficacy of the four hUCB-MSCs.

Novel embryoid body-based method to derive mesenchymal stem cells from human embryonic stem cells.

Application of human embryonic stem cells (hESCs) to stem-cell therapy is not feasible because of the risk of tumorigenicity and rejection. In contrast, human mesenchymal stem cells (hMSCs) are free from the risk of tumorigenicity and also have immune privilege. However, hMSCs obtained from adults have infinite variety in terms of the biological characteristics and functionality.

Impact of myocardial infarct proteins and oscillating pressure on the differentiation of mesenchymal stem cells: effect of acute myocardial infarction on stem cell differentiation.

Stem cell transplantation in acute myocardial infarction (AMI) has emerged as a promising therapeutic option. We evaluated the impact of AMI on mesenchymal stem cell (MSC) differentiation into cardiomyocyte lineage. Cord blood-derived human MSCs were exposed to in vitro conditions simulating in vivo environments of the beating heart with acute ischemia, as follows: (a) myocardial proteins or serum obtained from sham-operated rats, and (b) myocardial proteins or serum from AMI rats, with or without application of oscillating pressure.