Anti-tumor effect against human cancer xenografts by a fully human monoclonal antibody to a variant 8-epitope of CD44R1 expressed on cancer stem cells.

Background: CD44 is a major cellular receptor for hyaluronic acids. The stem structure of CD44 encoded by ten normal exons can be enlarged by ten variant exons (v1-v10) by alternative splicing. We have succeeded in preparing MV5 fully human IgM and its class-switched GV5 IgG monoclonal antibody (mAb) recognizing the extracellular domain of a CD44R1 isoform that contains the inserted region coded by variant (v8, v9 and v10) exons and is expressed on the surface of various human epithelial cancer cells.

The entire cDNA sequences of projectin isoforms of crayfish claw closer and flexor muscles and their localization.

Projectin is a giant protein related to twitchin and titin/connectin, that is found in arthropod striated muscle. The complete sequence of a 1 MDa projectin from Drosophila muscle was recently deduced from a thorough analysis of the genomic DNA (Southgate and Ayme-Southgate, 2001). Here we report the complete sequence for projectin from crayfish claw closer muscle (8625 residues; 962,634 Da).