1,721,159 research outputs found
Emerging anti-cancer molecular mechanisms of aminobisphosphonates
No full textBone metastases are common in patients with many types of cancer, especially breast and prostatecancer — in which the incidence is approximately 70% among patients with advanced metastaticdisease. Aminobisphosphonates (NBPs) have entered clinical practice in the treatment of bonemetastases from several neoplasms, including breast and prostate adenocarcinoma, as a result oftheir anti-resorption properties. However, evidence has accumulated on the direct anti-tumoureffects of NBPs. This review describes the metabolic pathways that are putative molecular targets ofNBPs and that are involved in the prenylation processes of several intracellular small GTP-bindingproteins (ras family related proteins). The latter regulate the intracellular survival and proliferativepathways of tumour cells and could be the intracellular molecular targets of the NBPs responsiblefor the direct anti-cancer effects, even if definitive conclusions cannot be drawn at present. Differentmechanisms have been reported to account for the anti-neoplastic action of NBPs, including: theinduction of apoptosis; cell cycle perturbations; and anti-invasive, anti-migration and anti-angiogeniceffects. Moreover, this review describes the most important clinical studies that demonstrate theactivity of NBPs in preventing skeletal-related events induced by bone metastases. The mainpharmacokinetic pitfalls of NBPs are described, and methods of overcoming these pitfalls throughthe use of liposome vehicles are proposed. Finally, the principal pre-clinical studies on theinteraction between NBPs and other biological agents are also described; these studies may enablereductions in the in vivo NBP concentrations required to achieve anti-tumour activity. To date,however, the real molecular targets of NBPs are not completely known and new technologicalplatforms are required in order to detect them and to develop new anti-cancer strategies based onthe use of NBPs
Highlights of the Annual Meeting of the Italian Association for Cell Cultures (AICC): new drug delivery strategies and technological platforms for diagnosis and therapy of tumors. Part II. 6 - 7 December 2007, Naples, Italy
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Remote Monitoring of Civil Infrastructure Based on TomoSAR
Full text linkStructural health monitoring and damage detection tools are extremely important topics nowadays with the civil infrastructure aging and deteriorating problems observed in urban areas. These tasks can be done by visual inspection and by using traditional in situ methods, such as leveling or using traditional mechanical and electrical sensors, but these approaches are costly, labor-intensive and cannot be performed with a high temporal frequency. In recent years, remote sensing has proved to be a very promising methodology in evaluating the health of a structure by assessing its deformation and thermal dilation. The satellite-based Synthetic Aperture Radar Tomography (TomoSAR) technique, based on the exploitation of a stack of multi-temporal SAR images, allows to remotely sense the movement and the thermal dilation of individual structures with a centimeter-to millimeter-level accuracy, thanks to new generation high-resolution satellite-borne sensors. In this paper, the effectiveness of a recently developed TomoSAR technique in assessing both possible deformations and the thermal dilation evolution of man-made structures is shown. The results obtained using X-band SAR data in two case studies, concerning two urban structures in the city of Naples (Italy), are presented
An improved SAR tomographic technique using contextual information
No full textSAR Tomography (TomoSAR) exploit multi-pass acquisitions and allow generating 3-D images, which provide an estimation of the scatterers distribution along range, azimuth and elevation. Usually the estimated elevation distribution of the scetterers in each range-azimuth pixel do not dependent on the neighboring ones (local approaches). In an urban environment, relationships among the elevations of neighboring pixels can be considerd exploiting its peculiar geometry. In this paper, the height profile is locally approximated with a planar surface and the parameters are estimated starting from the pixel values in the same position and in a “cluster” of neighboring positions. A GLRT approach is proposed to detect the presence of the scatteres. Results on simulated and real data validate the proposed approach
Fattori predittivi di tossicità correlata alla Chemioterapia: Carcinoma del Colon-Retto
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