Cystic fibrosis (CF) is one of the most lethal autosomal recessive disorder caused by mutations in the gene encoding the cystic fibrosis transmembrane conductance regulator (CFTR). It is estimated that about 60–70% of CF patients develop Pseudomonas aeruginosa chronic infection, with progressive loss of lung function, as well as increased antibiotic resistance and mortality.
Tobramycin has become an important […]
Prostate cancer is the most common cancer among men, with approximately 1.1 million new cases diagnosed per year worldwide. Most cancer-related deaths are caused by metastases in vital organs, with bones among the most frequent sites of prostate cancer metastases.
So far, various synthetic carriers have been developed to form compact nano-sized complexes carrying cancer therapeutics […]
Biotechnology companies Aptamer Group and Valitacell Ltd have joined forces to develop a next-generation screening platform for drug development.
Aptamer Group will be working alongside Valitacell to engineer the platform, in which aptamers – short sequences of DNA or RNA – are used in Valitacell’s high throughput screening processes. These screening processes can rapidly identify promising […]
Virus mediated gene therapy has emerged as a powerful and promising option for the treatment of various diseases such as metabolic, cardiovascular, muscular, hematologic, ophthalmologic, and infectious diseases and different types of cancer.
Among the viral vectors, adeno-associated virus (AAV) is particularly attractive because of its properties of low immunogenicity, high transfection efficiency and long-term transgene […]
DNA–protein interactions constitute essential biological processes such as replication, transcription and DNA repair. Mechanistic knowledge of these interactions offers insight into cell regulation, which holds the key to unlocking therapeutic targets for diseases such as cancer.
One common approach for identifying DNA sequence(s) that bind a particular protein-of-interest (POI) is based on a pull-down assay also […]
Aptamer based cancer immunotherapy
A promising strategy in cancer immunotherapy is the employment of a bispecific agent that can bind with both tumour markers and immunocytes for recruitment of lymphocytes to tumour sites and enhancement of anticancer immune reactions. Until recently, chimeric antigen receptor T (CAR-T) cell therapy and immune checkpoint blockade (ICB) are the remarkable […]
19th December 2019
The contamination of the environment with pesticide residues has become one of the most serious problems of public health in the world, due to their wide application in agriculture industry to guarantee the crop yield and quality. This has necessitated the development of rapid, easy and highly sensitive approaches for the detection of […]
12th December 2019
Continuous improvement in imaging techniques have allowed biologists to explore with accurate methods to label cellular elements as they surpass the limit imposed by the diffraction of light. The resolution is mainly affected by the size of the affinity probes, such as antibodies which are 10-15 nm in size. Moreover, non-specificity, over labeling […]
14th November 2019
Flow cytometry has gained popularity and demand in the field of biology because of its accurate analysis and high throughput. The use of multiple lasers, affinity ligands and attached fluorophores allows simultaneous analysis of several markers expressed on thousands of cells per second (Figure 1). Some of the most widely used applications include […]
