Publications by authors named "Maciulaitis R"

Article Synopsis
  • Acute kidney injury (AKI) can lead to chronic kidney disease (CKD), and effective treatments for AKI are urgently needed.
  • Researchers isolated and characterized human placental mesenchymal stromal cells (hpMSCs) to test their effects in a rat model of AKI, where one group received hpMSCs and others received saline or no treatment.
  • The study found that hpMSCs significantly improved kidney function, increased survival rates, and prevented early kidney damage, while also establishing a reliable manufacturing process for these cells.
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  • The link between chronic kidney disease (CKD) and cognitive function is gaining attention, particularly focusing on the effects of antibacterial agents (ABs) used in CKD patients who are more prone to infections.
  • This review highlights how ABs can have direct neurotoxic effects on the central nervous system (CNS) and discusses how these medications can also alter gut microbiota, impacting cognitive symptoms through the brain-gut-kidney axis.
  • The findings emphasize the need for careful monitoring of AB therapies in CKD patients to manage adverse drug reactions, particularly antibiotic-associated encephalopathy.
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  • The pilot study investigated how placental mesenchymal stem/stromal cells (MSCs) affect immune cells from patients with hidradenitis suppurativa (HS) by examining peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs) from both healthy individuals and HS patients.
  • PBMCs from HS patients displayed higher levels of the pro-inflammatory cytokines IL-6 and IFN-γ compared to those from healthy subjects, indicating increased inflammation.
  • The study found that co-culture with activated MSCs significantly reduced PBMC proliferation and inflammatory cytokine production, suggesting MSCs may have therapeutic potential for HS, although further research with a larger sample size is needed for confirmation.
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: To date, the therapeutic potential of skeletal muscle-derived stem/progenitor cells (MDSPCs) for acute kidney injury (AKI) has only been evaluated by our research group. We aimed to compare MDSPCs with bone marrow mesenchymal stem cells (BM-MSCs) and evaluate their feasibility for the treatment of AKI. : Rats were randomly assigned to four study groups: control, GM (gentamicin) group, GM+MDSPCs, and GM+BM-MSCs.

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This study investigates the therapeutic potential of human placental mesenchymal stem cells (P-MSCs) and their extracellular vesicles (EVs) in a murine model of acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS), a condition with growing relevance due to its association with severe COVID-19. We induced ARDS-like lung injury in mice using intranasal LPS instillation and evaluated histological changes, neutrophil accumulation via immunohistochemistry, bronchoalveolar lavage fluid cell count, total protein, and cytokine concentration, as well as lung gene expression changes at three time points: 24, 72, and 168 h. We found that both P-MSCs and EV treatments reduced the histological evidence of lung injury, decreased neutrophil infiltration, and improved alveolar barrier integrity.

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Article Synopsis
  • People with chronic kidney disease (CKD) often experience cognitive problems due to various factors, including medication side effects.
  • The complexity of treating CKD patients increases due to polypharmacy, as they usually have multiple health issues requiring numerous medications, which raises the risk of adverse drug reactions.
  • The review emphasizes two main points: CKD can disrupt the blood-brain barrier, and impaired kidney function can alter how drugs are processed in the body, leading to higher risks for issues affecting the central nervous system.
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Regenerative medicine has great potential. The pace of scientific advance is exciting and the medical opportunities for regeneration and repair may be transformative. However, concerns continue to grow, relating to problems caused both by unscrupulous private clinics offering unregulated therapies based on little or no evidence and by premature regulatory approval on the basis of insufficient scientific rationale and clinical evidence.

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Purpose: Sharing and developing digital educational resources and open educational resources has been proposed as a way to harmonize and improve clinical pharmacology and therapeutics (CPT) education in European medical schools. Previous research, however, has shown that there are barriers to the adoption and implementation of open educational resources. The aim of this study was to determine perceived opportunities and barriers to the use and creation of open educational resources among European CPT teachers and possible solutions for these barriers.

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The glomerular filtration rate (GFR), according to which the drug dose for patients with chronic kidney disease (CKD) is adjusted, is computed with estimators (eGFR) that are developed specifically for CKD. These particular types of estimators are also used in population pharmacokinetic (pop PK) modelling in drug development. Similar approaches without scientific validation have been proposed for patients with acute kidney injury (AKI), yet it is uncertain which specific eGFR should be used for drug dosing or in pop PK models in patients with AKI.

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Aim: Improvement and harmonization of European clinical pharmacology and therapeutics (CPT) education is urgently required. Because digital educational resources can be easily shared, adapted to local situations and re-used widely across a variety of educational systems, they may be ideally suited for this purpose.

Methods: With a cross-sectional survey among principal CPT teachers in 279 out of 304 European medical schools, an overview and classification of digital resources was compiled.

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Little is known about undergraduate education on antibiotic prescribing in Europe and even less about the antibiotic prescribing skills of nearly-graduated medical students. This study aimed to evaluate the antibiotic prescribing skills of final-year medical students across Europe and the education they received during medical training. In a cross-sectional study, final-year medical students from 17 medical schools in 15 European countries were asked to prescribe for two written case reports of infectious diseases (acute bronchitis and community-acquired pneumonia).

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Objective: The objective of this study was to assess a novel 3D microstructured scaffold seeded with allogeneic chondrocytes (cells) in a rabbit osteochondral defect model.

Design: Direct laser writing lithography in pre-polymers was employed to fabricate custom silicon-zirconium containing hybrid organic-inorganic (HOI) polymer SZ2080 scaffolds of a predefined morphology. Hexagon-pored HOI scaffolds were seeded with chondrocytes (cells), and tissue-engineered cartilage biocompatibility, potency, efficacy, and shelf-life was assessed by morphological, ELISA (enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay) and PCR (polymerase chain reaction) analysis.

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Advanced therapy medicinal products (ATMPs), ., cell and gene therapy products, is a rapidly evolving field of therapeutic development. A significant proportion of the products are being developed by academia or small/medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).

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Harmonizing clinical pharmacology and therapeutics (CPT) education in Europe is necessary to ensure that the prescribing competency of future doctors is of a uniform high standard. As there are currently no uniform requirements, our aim was to achieve consensus on key learning outcomes for undergraduate CPT education in Europe. We used a modified Delphi method consisting of three questionnaire rounds and a panel meeting.

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Effective teaching in pharmacology and clinical pharmacology and therapeutics (CPT) is necessary to make medical students competent prescribers. However, the current structure, delivery, and assessment of CPT education in the European Union (EU) is unknown. We sent an online questionnaire to teachers with overall responsibility for CPT education in EU medical schools.

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This Info article offers an overview on the main historical facts and the current perspectives of the scientific and educational competence in field of pharmacology in three European countries on Baltic sea East coast: Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. The research areas have changed constantly due to economical and political reasons during the last 200 years and today do cover quite different pharmacological areas in each of Baltic countries and are recognized internationally. Today the main topics of studies in Estonia are the pharmacology of neurodegenerative diseases, mood disorders and brain plasticity; the role of mitochondria in neurodegenerative diseases, and the epigenetics of drug dependence.

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Skeletal muscle-derived stem/progenitor cells (MDSPCs) have been thoroughly investigated and already used in preclinical studies. However, therapeutic potential of MDSPCs isolated using preplate isolation technique for acute kidney injury (AKI) has not been evaluated. We aimed to characterize rat MDSPCs, compare them with bone marrow mesenchymal stem cells (BM-MSCs), and evaluate the feasibility of MDSPCs therapy for gentamicin-induced AKI in rats.

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Regenerative pharmacology and advanced therapy medicinal products is a relatively new and challenging field in drug development. Acute kidney injury (AKI) is a common clinical condition in nephrology with increasing incidence and high mortality rate. During the last few decades, researchers have been eagerly trying to find novel therapeutic strategies for AKI treatment, including advanced pharmacological therapies using mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs).

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Legislative requirements for the quality of pharmacological agents underwent certain evolution when new type of therapies emerged. This relates to cell based medicines, such as tissue engineered cartilage products (TECP) which are increasingly developed as new modalities for widely prevalent orthopaedic disorders. Although quality measures for TECP are subject to the same general regulatory quality requirements, combination of cellular and scaffold substances requires definition of specific characteristics in vitro that are highly relevant to potency and efficacy of the newly designed medicinal product.

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In the past decade, novel cell-based products have been studied in patients with acute and chronic cardiac disease to assess whether these therapies are efficacious in improving heart function and preventing the development of end-stage heart failure. Cardiac indications studied include acute myocardial infarction (AMI), refractory angina, and chronic heart failure (CHF). Increased clinical activity, experience, and multiple challenges faced by developers have been recognized at the regulatory level.

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Background: In the European Union (EU), a medicinal product needs a marketing authorization (MA) to be placed on the market. The EU's medicinal products' legislative framework allows for a reduced application for medicines outside their data exclusivity. One such type of application is the well-established use (WEU) medicinal product application (i.

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Over the last decade DLW employing ultrafast pulsed lasers has become a well-established technique for the creation of custom-made free-form three-dimensional (3D) microscaffolds out of a variety of materials ranging from proteins to biocompatible glasses. Its potential applications for manufacturing a patient's specific scaffold seem unlimited in terms of spatial resolution and geometry complexity. However, despite few exceptions in which live cells or primitive organisms were encapsulated into a polymer matrix, no demonstration of an in vivo study case of scaffolds generated with the use of such a method was performed.

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