Cancer Research Institute

About: Cancer Research Institute is a nonprofit organization based out in New York, New York, United States. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Cancer & Population. The organization has 1061 authors who have published 754 publications receiving 26712 citations.

Application of Adult Stem Cells in Medicine

Abstract: For any disease condition, there are two possible approaches to treatment. Treatment approaches that alleviate or suppress the disease condition are the most widespread available options for majority of diseases. This type of treatment is often applied in the form of drugs (chemical or biological) with or without surgical intervention. The second type of treatment approach reverts the pathogenic situation to normal or original state. This second option is rare, applicable to few of the diseases where drugs cannot mend the situation and are not able to restore or regenerate the normal function of the damaged tissue or organ. Regenerative remedies are commonly applied through stem cell therapy and to some extent by organ transplantation. Stem cells, the architect of all the structural and functional units of our body, are the utmost hope for many incurable diseases like diabetes, cardiac disease, Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, and other neurodegenerative diseases and injury related trauma. These cells depending upon their nature of origin can differentiate into many or specific kind of mature cell type to rebuild the tissue. Stem cells are present at various stages of life (embryonic, fetal, and adult). Adult stem cells have the most potential and are the safest for therapeutic utilization. Stem cell therapy is extensively used in clinic for curing hematological malignancies. However, for many other dreadful life threatening diseases, stem cell therapy is still in experimental phase and requires major effort to bring them into clinical practice. For the last few months, we have been busy reviewing various articles sent by renowned scientists across the world for our special issue on “Application of Adult Stem Cells in Medicine.” After stringent reviews, ten articles have been selected that cover many critical aspects of stem cell therapy. They include reviews focusing on success of stem cell therapy in various diseases and original research and articles related to improvement in various aspects of stem cell therapy. Cartilage defects and/or degeneration resulting from injury, aging, and osteoarthritis are a major cause of joint pain and disability that seriously affect quality of life. Unfortunately current surgical or pharmacological treatments can only help in temporary relief and delay in disease progression. In recent years, new strategies have been devised to repair the damaged cartilage using adult stem cells. This pressing issue of regenerating cartilage using stem cells has been elaborated by two papers in this issue. F. Perdisa et al. have discussed all recent in vivo studies on adipose derived mesenchymal stem cells for the treatment of articular cartilage defect. However, C. Bauge and K. Boumediene have reviewed the current status and future developments of adult stem cell therapy towards cartilage tissue engineering. Both of these papers have elucidated the promises and limitations of stem cell transplantation for cartilage defect. Readers will be aware of the major development and the specific future focus happening in this field. Intracerebral hemorrhage (ICH) caused by sudden increase in blood pressure is not as common as ischemic stroke but is more serious and quickly causes brain and nerve damage. Depending on the location of hemorrhage and amount of injury long term treatments including physical, speech, and occupational therapy are applied but majority survive with some kind of permanent disability. In recent years, stem cell transplantation as well as cell engineering has shown promising results for various neurological diseases and regeneration of injured nerves. Application of such therapies is rare in patients suffering from ICH. J. Zhu et al., in this issue, discussed their findings on autologous bone marrow stromal cell transplantation for treating 206 patients suffering from ICH. This clinical study assessed the safety profile, feasibility, and effectiveness of surgery combined with autologous BMSC transplantation for treating ICH. Though they were unable to assess the differentiation ability of BMSC into neuronal cells and could not pursue long term followup, their study indisputably showed encouraging clinical outcome. In another review by V. Sabapathy et al., the potential of various cell therapy strategies for treating spinal cord injury has been discussed in detail with an emphasis on source of cells and appropriate preclinical models. This review highlights the insufficient data and research involved in spinal cord injury and calls for more complete and multicentric clinical trials. Probably the most demanding area for stem cell application is the incurable neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson disease, and Huntington disease. Though etiology and symptoms of these diseases are well characterized, the underlying mechanism is yet to be understood. Therefore current treatments majorly aim towards delaying progression of the disease. Lack of appropriate animal models simulating the human pathogenesis also demands development of human disease-specific models to identify new drugs. Induced pluripotent stem cells or iPSCs have revolutionized the field of regenerative medicine and are now being utilized as models for neurodegenerative disorders to understand the biology of pathogenesis and screen novel therapeutics. Recent advancements in this newly emerging area are described in detail by W. Wan et al. in this special issue. Their manuscript presents a comprehensive review on application of iPSC in various neurodegenerative diseases narrating the promises and concerned issues. A major thrust in stem cell research is to experiment new approaches for efficient and lineage specific differentiation of stem cells. In this special issue, three independent investigations highlight the importance of such trials for various diseases. Oliviera et al. demonstrated that priming of MSCs with endothelial growth medium improves therapeutic efficacy in the treatment of systemic arterial hypertension in a rat model. Enhanced differentiation of neuronal stem cells by Oleanolic Acid (OA) was evaluated by Y. Ning et al., who found that Nkx-2.5 transcription factor partially regulates this differentiation process. Similarly, V. Nardone et al. showed that in vitro Strontium treatment of hADSCs enhances cell proliferation and osteogenic differentiation through expression of early and late osteoblastic biomarkers such as ALP and HA, respectively. Their findings clearly support the use of Strontium in in vitro induction of bone regeneration. The placenta, amniotic fluid, and umbilical cord are known to be rich source for neonatal MSCs. Cryopreservation of umbilical cord immediately after birth has already been commercial practice to tackle future life threatening diseases. However, such practice must be dealt with care and properly designed expreiments as discussed by O. Maslova et al. in their review. Last but not the least, S. Kumar et al. investigated an important aspect required for final acceptance of stem cells in clinic by repetitive and noninvasive tracking of ICG labeled human placental derived MSC transplanted in live mouse. Altogether, this special issue compiles a wide range of information on experimental and translational application of adult stem cell in regenerative medicine. We hope that contributions will generate new thoughts to readers of this journal.

Identification of morphological and biochemical changes in keratin-8/18 knock-down cells using Raman spectroscopy.

Abstract: Accurate understanding of cellular processes and responses to stimuli is of paramount importance in biomedical research and diagnosis. Raman spectroscopy (RS), a label-free and nondestructive spectroscopic method has the potential to serve as a novel 'theranostics' tool. Both fiber-optic and micro-Raman studies have demonstrated efficacy in diagnostics and therapeutic response monitoring. In the present study, we have evaluated the potential of micro-Raman spectroscopic maps in identifying changes induced by loss of K8/18 proteins in a tongue cancer cell line. Furthermore, we also evaluated the efficacy of less expensive and commercially available fiber probes to identify K8/18 wild and knock-down cell pellets, in view of the utility of cell pellet-based studies. The findings suggest that major differences in the cellular morphology and biochemical composition can be objectively identified and can be utilized for classification using both micro-Raman and fiber-probe-based RS. These findings highlight the potential of fiber-optic probe-based RS in noninvasive cellular phenotyping for diagnosis and therapeutic response monitoring, especially in low-resource settings.

The proteomic analysis shows enrichment of RNA surveillance pathways in adult SHH and extensive metabolic reprogramming in Group 3 medulloblastomas.

Abstract: Medulloblastoma, a common malignant brain tumor in children, comprises four molecular subgroups WNT, SHH, Group 3, and Group 4. In the present study, we performed a deep proteome-based investigation of SHH, Group 3 and Group 4 tumors. The adult SHH medulloblastomas were found to have a distinct proteomic profile. Several RNA metabolism-related pathways including mRNA splicing, 5' to 3' RNA decay, 3' to 5' RNA decay by the RNA exosome, and the N6-methyladenosine modification of RNA were enriched in adult SHH tumors. The heightened expression of the RNA surveillance pathways is likely to be essential for the viability of adult SHH subgroup medulloblastomas, which carry mutations in U1snRNA encoding gene and thus could be a vulnerability of these tumors. Group 3 and Group 4 medulloblastomas, on the other hand, are known to have an overlap in their expression profiles and underlying genetic alterations. Group 3 proteome was found to be distinctively enriched in several metabolic pathways including glycolysis, gluconeogenesis, glutamine anabolism, glutathione-mediated anti-oxidant pathway, and drug metabolism pathway suggests that the extensive metabolic rewiring is likely to be responsible for the aggressive clinical behavior of Group 3 tumors. This comprehensive proteomic analysis has provided valuable insight into the biology of Group 3 and adult SHH medulloblastomas, which could be further explored for effective treatment of these tumors.

Main Regularities and Health Risks from Exposure to Non-Thermal Microwaves of Mobile Communication

Abstract: Various responses to non-thermal microwaves (MW) from mobile communication including adverse health effects related to electrohypersensitivity, cancer risks, neurological effects, and reproductive impacts have been reported while some studies reported no such effects. This presentation provides an overview of the complex dependence of the MW effects on various physical and biological variables, which account for, at least partially, an apparent inconsistence in the published data. Among other variables, dependencies on carrier frequency, polarization, modulation, intermittence, electromagnetic stray fields, genotype, physiological traits, and cell density during exposure were reported. Nowadays, biological and health effects of 5G communication, which will use microwaves of extremely high frequencies (millimeter waves MMW, wavelength 1- 10 mm), are of significant public concern. It follows from available studies that MMW, under specific conditions of exposure at very low intensities below the ICNIRP guidelines, can affect biological systems and human health. Both positive and negative effects were observed in dependence on exposure parameters. In particular, MMW inhibited repair of DNA damage induced by ionizing radiation at specific frequencies and polarizations. To what extend the 5G technology and the Internet of Things will affect the biota and human health is definitely not known. However, based on possible fundamental role of MMW in regulation of homeostasis and almost complete absence of MMW in atmosphere due to effective absorption, which suggests the lack of adaptation to this type of radiation, the health effects of chronic MMW exposures may be more significant than for any other frequency range.