Targeting Cancer Metabolism and Cell Cycle by Plant-Derived Compounds.

Cancer has an increasing death rate over the world population without discriminating between the industrial and developing countries. Complexity of cancer such as ability of cancer cells to develop resistance to drugs or differential behavior of sub-types and different responses from the patients indicate the continuous need for research and development of new anticancer drugs, new formulations of drug combinations and treatment strategies. Not too surprisingly nature itself, is often the largest territorial reservoir as a source for this type of research and development. Speaking of plant variety, more than 1000 plants have already been identified to produce agents with anticancer activities. In this review, a panel of plant derived anti-cancer agents will be reiterated in terms of their mechanism of action in treatment of disease.

Zooming in across the Skin: A Macro-to-Molecular Panorama.

Maintaining integrity of the skin and its appendages still preserves its top-ranking in priorities of survival for the modern human as it probably once did for the ancient individual, -not only- because it is the primary barrier to external assaults, but also because of social and psychological impact of healthy skin during their life-span. Healing wounds in order to shield off the internal organs from infections and damage, restoring its ability to adapt to various environmental stimuli, and slowing-down and reversing aging of the skin in the quest for an everlasting youth can be named as a few of the main drivers behind the multi-million investments dedicated to the advancement of our understanding of skin's physiology. Over the years, these tremendous efforts culminated in the breakthrough discovery of skin stem cells the regenerative capacity of which accounted for the resilience of the skin through their unique capacity as a special cell type that can both self-renew and differentiate into various lineages. In this review, first we summarize the current knowledge on this amazing organ both at a structural and functional level. Next, we provide a comprehensive -in depth- discussion on epidermal as well as dermal stem cells in terms of the key regulatory pathways as well as the main genetic factors that have been implicated in the orchestration of the skin stem cell biology in regards to the shifts between quiescence and entry into distinct differentiation programs.

Suppressive Role of Boron on Adipogenic Differentiation and Fat Deposition in Human Mesenchymal Stem Cells.

Over the past years, adipose tissue has become an invaluable source of mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) due to development of improved isolation methodologies. In a recent work, our group established a primary culture of human adipose-derived stem cells (hADSCs), which were characterized for their stem cell characteristics in detail and studied their myogenic differentiation potential in presence of boron. In the current study, we focused on the effects of a boron-containing compound, sodium pentaborate pentahydrate (NaB), on the adipogenic differentiation of hADSCs. Incorporation of boron in various chemical derivates has been a novel interest in drug-discovery attempts due to increasing number of reports on their anticancer, antibacterial, antiviral, and antifungal activities. In this report, a striking suppressive activity of boron on adipogenic differentiation of hADSCs is observed in a dose-dependent manner. Higher concentrations of NaB (20, 50, and 100 µg/mL (68, 170 and 340 µM)) resulted in a progressive decrease of lipid deposition, suppressed master regulators of adipogenesis transcriptional programming at the mRNA and protein levels, while having no evident cytotoxicity on the cells. The findings of this study are encouraging to undertake further investigations on potential beneficial effects boron in terms of its impact on normal and dysfunctional adipose biology. In that respect, these results pave the path to evaluate boron-based compounds in prevention and treatment of obesity which is a modern age pandemic that is predominant worldwide and found in strong association with comorbidities, including type 2 diabetes, hypertension, cardiovascular disease, cancers, and others."