Inhibitory Activities of Dimeric Ellagitannins Isolated from Cornus alba on Benign Prostatic Hypertrophy.

Benign prostatic hypertrophy (BPH) is an intractable chronic inflammatory disease. We studied the efficacy of two ellagitannins, namely camptothin B (1) and cornusiin A (2) that were isolated from Cornus alba (CA) for the treatment of BPH, which is a common health issue in older men. The ellagitannins (1 and 2) were evaluated on its inhibitory activities of the enzyme 5α-reductase and tumor necrosis factor (TNF)-α, its interleukin (IL)-1ß, IL-6, and IL-8 production, and its anti-proliferation and apoptosis induction in prostate cells that show hypertrophy (RWPE-1 cell). In inhibition of 5α-reductase, the ellagitannins (1 and 2) showed potential effects, compared to the positive control, finasteride. In the case of IL-1ß, IL-6, IL-8, and TNF-α, 1 and 2 showed good inhibitory effects as compared to the control group treated with LPS. The ellagitannins (1 and 2) were also shown to inhibit proliferation of, and induce apoptosis in, the RWPE-1 cell. These results suggest that the ellagitannins (1 and 2) may be good candidates for the treatment of BPH.

Anti-Acne Vulgaris Effects of Pedunculagin from the Leaves of Quercus mongolica by Anti-Inflammatory Activity and 5α-Reductase Inhibition.

Quercus mongolica (QM)-a member of the Fagaceae family-has been used as traditional medicine in Korea, China and Mongolia as a treatment for inflammation of oral, genital or anal mucosa and for external inflammation of skin. To treat acne vulgaris (AV), we evaluated the inhibition of inflammatory cytokines (IL-6 and IL-8) of QM leaf extract (QML) and its main compound, pedunculagin (PD) in vitro and 5α-reductase inhibitory activity by western blotting. As results, QML and PD showed potent NO production inhibitory activity compared with the positive control (PC), NG-monomethyl-L-arginine (L-NMMA). QML and PD was also showed the decreases of IL-6 and IL-8 compared with the PC, EGCG and exhibited potent 5α-reductase type 1 inhibitory activities compared with the PC, dutasteride.

Endoscopic Hyperspectral Imaging System to Discriminate Tissue Characteristics in Tissue Phantom and Orthotopic Mouse Pancreatic Tumor Model.

In this study, we developed an endoscopic hyperspectral imaging (eHSI) system and evaluated its performance in analyzing tissues within tissue phantoms and orthotopic mouse pancreatic tumor models. Our custom-built eHSI system incorporated a liquid crystal tunable filter. To assess its tissue discrimination capabilities, we acquired images of tissue phantoms, distinguishing between fat and muscle regions. The system underwent supervised training using labeled samples, and this classification model was then applied to other tissue phantom images for evaluation. In the tissue phantom experiment, the eHSI effectively differentiated muscle from fat and background tissues. The precision scores regarding fat tissue classification were 98.3% for the support vector machine, 97.7% for the neural network, and 96.0% with a light gradient-boosting machine algorithm, respectively. Furthermore, we applied the eHSI system to identify tumors within an orthotopic mouse pancreatic tumor model. The F-score of each pancreatic tumor-bearing model reached 73.1% for the KPC tumor model and 63.1% for the Pan02 tumor models. The refined imaging conditions and optimization of the fine-tuning of classification algorithms enhance the versatility and diagnostic efficacy of eHSI in biomedical applications.