Bacterial nanocellulose (BNC), a nanofibrillar polysaccharide produced by certain acetic acid bacteria, may be used in food, pharma and many other applications. As with other nanoscale celluloses, the oral toxicology of BNC is still controversial. Therefore, we aimed to assess whether BNC is absorbed at the intestine following administration in Wistar rats. This is, to our knowledge, the first attempt to track ...
Uveal melanoma (UM) is the most common malignant intraocular tumour in the adult population. It is a rare cancer with an incidence of nearly five cases per million inhabitants per year, which develops from the uncontrolled proliferation of melanocytes in the choroid (≈90%), ciliary body (≈6%) or iris (≈4%). Patients initially present either with symptoms like blurred vision or photopsia, or without symptoms, wi...
Basaloid follicular hamartoma (BFH) is a normally benign, uncommon, malformative lesion involving the hair follicles, which usually poses challenges in the differential diagnosis with other benign and malignant tumours, especially basal cell carcinoma, due to significant clinical and morphological overlap. Here, we report the case of a 53-year-old male who presented with a mass in the upper left eyelid evolving...
Immunoglobulin G4 related-disease (IgG4-RD) is a multisystemic immune-mediated fibroinflammatory disease, with a strong predilection for salivary and lacrimal glands, pancreas, biliary tree, lungs, kidneys, aorta, and retroperitoneum. In the case of pancreatic involvement, it manifests as autoimmune pancreatitis. Patients with IgG4-RD usually have mild to moderate eosinophilia in the peripheral blood, however, ...
The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has dramatically changed the world over the past weeks, with already 8,25 million infections and 445,000 deaths worldwide, leading to an unprecedented international global effort to contain the virus and prevent its spread. The emergence of novel respiratory viruses such as the SARS-CoV-2 creates dramatic challenges to the healthcare services, including surgical ...
Actinomycosis is an uncommon, endogenous, and chronic infection with varied and nonspecific clinical features such as abdominal, pelvic or cervical masses, ulcerative lesions, abscesses, draining fistula, fibrosis, and constitutional symptoms. The disease ensues when the bacteria disrupt the mucosal barrier, invade, and spread throughout interfascial planes. Currently, the diagnosis of actinomycosis is challeng...
The glutamate transporter 1 (GLT1) is upregulated during astrocyte development and maturation in vivo and is vital for astrocyte function. Yet it is expressed at low levels by most cultured astrocytes. We previously showed that maturation of human and mouse stem cell-derived astrocytes - including functional glutamate uptake - could be enhanced by fibroblast growth factor (FGF)1 or FGF2. Here, we examined the s...
Mutations in the PARK2 gene, which encodes PARKIN, are the most frequent cause of autosomal recessive Parkinson's disease (PD). We report the generation of an induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC) line from a 78-year-old patient carrying a compound heterozygous mutation (c.823C>T and EX6del) in the PARK2 gene. Skin fibroblasts were reprogrammed using the non-integrating Sendai virus technology to deliver OCT3/4,...
Suboptimal axonal regeneration contributes to the consequences of nervous system trauma and neurodegenerative disease, but the intrinsic mechanisms that regulate axon growth remain unclear. We screened 50,400 small molecules for their ability to promote axon outgrowth on inhibitory substrata. The most potent hits were the statins, which stimulated growth of all mouse- and human-patient-derived neurons tested, b...