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Secondary lymphedema has been clinically well described, but a cure is still lacking. Although there have been previous investigations using plasmid DNA for gene therapy, few have focused on the use for the treatment of lymphedema. Therefore, we investigated the effects of VEGF-C gene transfer for the treatment of lymphedema using our plasmid pcDNA3.1-VEGF-C. We produced a surgical model of secondary lymphedema in the rat hindlimb and treated with local intradermal VEGF-C transfection to investigate the efficacy of gene transfer. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) (P<0.05), B ultrasound (P<0.05), and water displacement volumetry (P<0.05) demonstrated a reduction of lymphedema in therapy group as compared to controls. Histological and immunofluorescent studies demonstrated numerous newly formed lymphatic vessels in therapy group. Our results indicate that VEGF-C gene therapy has produced new lymphatic vessels which may have improved functional lymphatic drainage to reduce lymphedema volume in our model.

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To study the efficacy of Fuganling granula (FGL, 复肝灵颗粒) in treating mouse immunological hepatic injury that was caused by Bacille Calmette Guerin (BCG) and lipopolysaccharide (LPS), a total of 60 mice were adopted, among which, 50 mice were given intraperitoneal injection with BCG and LPS to establish an immunological liver injury model and then were randomly divided into 5 groups (10 mice/group): 4 groups received treatment of FGL orally at the doses of 100 mg/kg (high-dosage), 50 mg/kg (middle-dosage), 25 mg/kg (lowdosage) and bifendate orally at the dose of 80 mg/kg, respectively. One group was treated with distilled water orally. The remaining 10 mice were given distilled water intraperitoneally as the normal control group. The indices of thymus, liver and spleen, and the activities of the alanine aminotransferase (ALT), aspartate aminotransferase (AST) in the serum were detected. Compared to the normal rat, the model group's thymus index decreased significantly. The liver index and spleen index increased significantly. The activities of serum ALT and AST increased significantly (all P < 0.01). Compared to the model control group, the group treated with FGL in high-dosage, middledosage or low-dosage can decrease the activities of ALT and AST and the group treated with FGL in high-dosage and middle-dosage can increase the thymus index significantly (P < 0.01). This experiment established the immunological liver injury model successfully and found that FGL has a remarkably protective effect on this kind of immunological hepatic injury.