Publications by authors named "N el Banna"

Aims: Lipids are central in the development of cardiovascular disease, and the present study aimed to characterize variation in lipid profiles across different countries to improve understanding of cardiovascular risk and opportunities for risk-reducing interventions.

Methods And Results: This first collaborative report of the Global Diagnostics Network (GDN) evaluated lipid distributions from nine laboratory organizations providing clinical laboratory testing in 17 countries on five continents. This cross-sectional study assessed aggregated lipid results from patients aged 20-89 years, tested at GDN laboratories, from 2018 through 2020.

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Article Synopsis
  • Auranofin (AUF) is a gold-based drug that's mainly used to treat arthritis but is being studied for treating cancer too.
  • It works by stopping a protein called thioredoxin reductase, but it also affects cancer cells in other ways depending on the type of cancer and how much is used.
  • In tests on breast cancer cells, AUF caused stress inside the cells that made them stop growing and weakened their structure, showing that AUF can have special effects that might help fight cancer better.
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Expression of the extensively glycosylated Ebolavirus glycoprotein (EBOV-GP) induces physical alterations of surface molecules and plays a crucial role in viral pathogenicity. Here we investigate the interactions of EBOV-GP with host surface molecules using purified EBOV-GP, EBOV-GP-transfected cell lines, and EBOV-GP-pseudotyped lentiviral particles. Subsequently, we wanted to examine which receptors are involved in this recognition by binding studies to cells transfected with the EBOV-GP as well as to recombinant soluble EBOV-GP.

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The quantification of cellular deoxyribonucleoside triphosphate (dNTP) levels is important for studying pathologies, genome integrity, DNA repair, and the efficacy of pharmacological drug treatments. Current standard methods, such as enzymatic assays or high-performance liquid chromatography, are complicated, costly, and labor-intensive, and alternative techniques that simplify dNTP quantification would present very useful complementary approaches. Here, we present a dNTP assay based on isothermal rolling circle amplification (RCA) and rapid time-gated Förster resonance energy transfer (TG-FRET), which used a commercial clinical plate reader system.

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Vitamin C (VitC) possesses pro-oxidant properties at high pharmacologic concentrations which favor repurposing VitC as an anti-cancer therapeutic agent. However, redox-based anticancer properties of VitC are yet partially understood. We examined the difference between the reduced and oxidized forms of VitC, ascorbic acid (AA) and dehydroascorbic acid (DHA), in terms of cytotoxicity and redox mechanisms toward breast cancer cells.

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