Drug combinations have demonstrated high efficacy and low adverse side effects compared to single drug administration in cancer therapies and thus have drawn intensive attention from researchers and pharmaceutical enterprises. Due to the rapid development of high-throughput screening (HTS), the number of drug combination datasets available has increased tremendously in recent years. Therefore, there is an urgent need for a comprehensive database that is crucial to both experimental and computational screening of synergistic drug combinations. In this paper, we present DrugCombDB, a comprehensive database devoted to the curation of drug combinations from various data sources: (i) HTS assays of drug combinations; (ii) manual curations from the literature; and (iii) FDA Orange Book and external databases. Specifically, DrugCombDB includes 448 555 drug combinations derived from HTS assays, covering 2887 unique drugs and 124 human cancer cell lines. In particular, DrugCombDB has more than 6000 000 quantitative dose responses from which we computed multiple synergy scores to determine the overall synergistic or antagonistic effects of drug combinations. In addition to the combinations extracted from existing databases, we manually curated 457 drug combinations from thousands of PubMed publications. To benefit the further experimental validation and development of computational models, multiple datasets that are ready to train prediction models for classification and regression analysis were constructed and other significant related data were gathered. A website with a user-friendly graphical visualization has been developed for users to access the wealth of data and download prebuilt datasets. Our database is available at http://drugcombdb.denglab.org/.

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Pt nanoparticle-based artificial catalase is decorated on black phosphorus nanosheets, achieving reinforced photodynamic antitumor performance.

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Extracellular vesicles (EVs) are lipid bilayer enclosed particles which present in almost all types of biofluids and contain specific proteins, lipids, and RNA. Increasing evidence has demonstrated the tremendous clinical potential of EVs as diagnostic and therapeutic tools, especially in biofluids, since they can be detected without invasive surgery. With the advanced mass spectrometry (MS), it is possible to decipher the protein content of EVs under different physiological and pathological conditions. Therefore, MS-based EV proteomic studies have grown rapidly in the past decade for biomarker discovery. This review focuses on the studies that isolate EVs from different biofluids and contain MS-based proteomic analysis. Literature published in the past decade (2009.1–2019.7) were selected and summarized with emphasis on isolation methods of EVs and MS analysis strategies, with the aim to give an overview of MS-based EV proteomic studies and provide a reference for future research.

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Gastrodin (GAS), which is extracted from the Chinese herbal medicine Gastrodia elata Blume, has long been used to improve stroke, epilepsy, dizziness and dementia. However, the effects and underlying mechanisms of GAS on subacute phase cerebral ischemia-reperfusion (I/R) injury remain unknown. The aim of the present study was to investigate the effects and mechanisms of GAS on cerebral I/R injury in rats. The rats were pretreated with GAS by gavage for 7 days followed by I/R surgery, and were then treated with GAS for 7 days after I/R surgery. Neurological deficits were assessed on days 1, 3 and 7 post-cerebral I/R injury. 2,3,5-Triphenyltetrazolium chloride staining was using to measure the infarct volume; morphological alterations were observed by hematoxylin and eosin staining under an optical microscope; apoptosis in the hippocampus and cortex was observed by terminal deoxynucleotidyl transferase dUTP nick end labeling staining; and the level of mRNA and protein expression was tested by reverse transcription-quantitative polymerase chain reation and western blot analysis, respectively. GAS markedly attenuated I/R-induced disability and histological damage, alleviated neuronal apoptosis, and reduced the mRNA and protein expression levels of inflammatory and proapoptotic factors, including interleukin-1β, cyclooxygenase-2, inducible nitric oxide synthase and cleaved caspase-3. These findings suggested that GAS may ameliorate subacute phase cerebral I/R injury by inhibiting inflammation and apoptosis in rats; therefore, GAS may be considered a potential candidate for the treatment of cerebral ischemia.

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