Knee osteoarthritis is a chronic, indolent disease that will affect an ever increasing number of patients, especially the elderly and the obese. It is characterized by degeneration of the cartilage substance inside the knee which leads to pain, stiffness and tenderness. By some estimations in 2030, only in the United States, this medical condition will burden 67 million people. While conventional treatments like physiotherapy or drugs offer temporary relief of clinical symptoms, restoration of normal cartilage function has been difficult to achieve. Moreover, in severe cases of knee osteoarthritis total knee replacement may be required. Total knee replacements come together with high effort and costs and are not always successful. The aim of this review is to outline the latest advances in stem cell therapy for knee osteoarthritis as well as highlight some of the advantages of stem cell therapy over traditional approaches aimed at restoration of cartilage function in the knee. In addition to the latest advances in the field, challenges associated with stem cell therapy regarding knee cartilage regeneration and chondrogenesis in vitro and in vivo are also outlined and analyzed. Furthermore, based on their critical assessment of the present academic literature the authors of this review share their vision about the future of stem cell applications in the treatment of knee osteoarthritis.
This monograph reviews the discovery and development of the cyclindependent kinase inhibitor roscovitine (R-roscovitine, CYC202, Seliciclib). The authors summarise the in vitro and in vivo data that have formed the basis for clinical investigation of Seliciclib as an anti-cancer drug. Kinase selectivity, cellular effects and the pharmacological properties of the drug are discussed in addition to the clinical results of Seliciclib being reviewed. Novel results on the effect of the drug in cardiac hypertrophy are summarized and potential applications of Seliciclib in other therapeutic areas, including, inflammation, virology, glomerulonephritis and polycystic kidney disease, are discussed. Finally the authors argue that optimisation of the therapeutic effect of kinase inhibitors such as Seliciclib can be enhanced using a systems biology approach involving mathematical modelling of the molecular pathways regulating cell growth and division.
Seliciclib -discovery and developmentBioDiscovery 2 December 2013 | Issue 10 | 1
Noise and greenhouse gas emission targets set by e.g., the EU commission, NASA, and ICAO oblige the aviation industry to reduce its environmental footprint. Battery-powered hybrid-electric aircraft are currently being investigated in this regard as they can potentially reduce in-flight greenhouse gas emissions and noise. However, most studies to date have focused on the CO2 emission reduction potential instead of considering the total life cycle environmental impact. Hence, within this study an environmental life cycle assessment method for a hybrid-electric aircraft is developed and applied, supplemented by a direct operating costs analysis. This allows the simultaneous evaluation of the environmental impact reduction potential and the economic consequences for aircraft operators. This demonstrates the faced trade-off and contributes to a meaningful review process. A single-aisle transport aircraft (A320 class) serves as a use case for the established methodology. It consists of the conceptual aircraft design, the environmental life cycle assessment, and the direct operating costs analysis for a conventional reference aircraft and a hybrid-electric aircraft with a discrete parallel powertrain architecture. It should be noticed that the focus of this study is the comparison of conceptual aircraft designs of the same fidelity on system level, in lieu of the detailed modeling of a hybrid-electric aircraft. Results show that for a degree of hybridization of 0.3, the environmental impact of the hybrid-electric configuration increased by $$15.1\%$$
15.1
%
, while the operating costs increased by $$41.0\%$$
41.0
%
compared to a conventional reference aircraft. For a future scenario, favourable for hybrid-electric aircraft with i.a. renewable electricity production, the environmental impact could be reduced by $$7.0\%$$
7.0
%
compared to the reference aircraft. At the same time, the operating costs gap between both configurations decreases to $$+ 26.8\%$$
+
26.8
%
. Hybrid-electric aircraft should therefore be investigated further as a potential solution to reduce the environmental impact of aviation, if simultaneously to developing them the expansion of renewable energies is fostered. Nevertheless, this reduction in environmental impact involves a high direct operating costs penalty.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.