Systemic aquired resistance

Pneumonia, classified as a lower respiratory tract illness, affects different parts of the bronchial system as well as alveoli and can present with varying severities depending on co-morbidities and causative pathogens. It can be broadly classified using the setting in which it was acquired, namely the community or hospital setting, the former being more common and spreading through person-to-person droplet transmission. Community-acquired pneumonia (CAP) is currently the fourth leading cause of death worldwide, and its high mortality makes continual insight into the management of the condition worthwhile...

BACKGROUND: As a bladder-preserving therapy, radiation therapy (RT) has been widely used in the treatment of bladder cancer (BCa) and made great progress in the past few decades. However, some BCa patients have low radiotherapy responsiveness and local recurrence rate after radiotherapy could reach 50%. Acquired radio-resistance (ARR) is one of the important reasons for the failure of RT. Unfortunately, these ARR cells also lack sensitivity to chemotherapy and cause tumor recurrence and metastasis...

Multiple combination therapies with chemotherapeutic drugs and inhibitors of drug resistance have been effective in the clinical cases, but concerns have been raised about the severe toxicity of these chemotherapeutic drugs. Herein, we report a potent and safe combination strategy of cancer-specific doxorubicin (DOX) prodrug nanoparticles (PNPs) and B-cell lymphoma-2 (Bcl-2) anti-apoptotic inhibitor, Navitoclax, to overcome acquired drug resistance during chemotherapy. The cancer-specific PNPs were constructed by conjugating cathepsin B-specific cleavable peptide (Phe-Arg-Arg-Gly; FRRG) to DOX, resulting in FRRG-DOX that self-assembled into nanoparticles and the FRRG-DOX nanoparticles were further stabilized with the FDA-approved pharmaceutical excipient, Pluronic F68...

BACKGROUND: The Gram-positive bacterium Enterococcus faecium is an important cause of nosocomial infections in immunocompromized patients. RESULTS: We present a pyrosequencing-based comparative genome analysis of seven E. faecium strains that were isolated from various sources. In the genomes of clinical isolates several antibiotic resistance genes were identified, including the vanA transposon that confers resistance to vancomycin in two strains. A functional comparison between E...

Recombinant adeno-associated virus type 2 (rAAV) has many properties of an ideal vector for gene therapy: broad spectrum of susceptible cells, efficient gene transfer, persistent transgene expression in vivo, and no indiction of vector-related toxicity. Ovarian carcinoma cell lines, however, were previously reported to be quite resistant to rAAV transduction. Using an optimized adenovirus-free packaging system, highly purified rAAV vectors coding for the enhanced green fluorescent protein (AAV/EGFP) and for mCD40 ligand (AAV/CD40L) were generated...