European Pharmacopoeia's Approach to Cell and Gene Therapy: Focus on How Gene Therapy Texts Are Evolving.

The European Pharmacopoeia (Ph. Eur.) constitutes single recognised common standard for the quality control of medicines in Europe, which is also applied in many countries worldwide.

Design, synthesis, and in vitro evaluation of new amphiphilic cyclodextrin-based nanoparticles for the incorporation and controlled release of acyclovir.

Acyclovir possesses low solubility in water and in lipid bilayers, so that its dosage forms do not allow suitable drug levels at target sites following oral, local, or parenteral administration. In order to improve this lack of solubility, new cyclodextrin-based amphiphilic derivatives have been designed to form nanoparticles, allowing the efficient encapsulation of this hydrophobic antiviral agent. The present work first describes the synthesis and characterization of five new O-2,O-3 permethylated O-6 alkylthio- and perfluoroalkyl-propanethio-amphiphilic β-cyclodextrins.

Induction of multiple CD8+ T cell responses against the inducible Hsp70 employing an Hsp70 oligoepitope peptide.

The inducible heat shock protein Hsp70 has been described as a tumour antigen being frequently overexpressed in tumours of various histologic origins, with a role in tumourigenicity, as a critical event in tumour progression. A strategy to enhance the immune response to an antigen is the identification of multiple epitopes and the induction of a polyspecific response. Applied to tumour vaccination, such a polyspecific response should lead to a more robust antitumour efficacy.

Expression of aberrantly glycosylated tumor mucin-1 on human DC after transduction with a fiber-modified adenoviral vector.

Background: DC-presenting tumor Ag are currently being developed to be used as a vaccine in human cancer immunotherapy. To increase chances for successful therapy it is important to deliver full-length tumor Ag instead of loading single peptides.

Methods: In this study we used a fiber-modified adenoviral vector (rAd5F35) containing full-length tumor Ag cDNA to transduce human monocyte (Mo)-derived DC in vitro.

Inducible Hsp70 as target of anticancer immunotherapy: Identification of HLA-A*0201-restricted epitopes.

The design of a broad application tumor vaccine requires the identification of tumor antigens expressed in a majority of tumors of various origins. We questioned whether the major stress-inducible heat shock protein Hsp70 (also known as Hsp72), a protein frequently overexpressed in human tumors of various histological origins, but not in most physiological normal tissues, constitutes a tumor antigen. We selected the p391 and p393 peptides from the sequence of the human inducible Hsp70 that had a high affinity for HLA-A*0201.