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As alternative medicines or dietary supplements, herbal medicines have received increasing interest in recent years. Danggui and Honghua are two of the most popular traditional Chinese herbal medicines. However, little is known about the pharmacokinetics interactions between Danggui/Honghua and prescription drugs. Therefore, the present study was undertaken to investigate the effect of Danggui or Honghua on the gene expression of cytochrome P450 (CYP) using reverse- transcriptase-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) in Wistar rats. Commercial Danggui (0.35 and 0.7 g/kg, twice a day), Honghua (0.35 g/kg or 0.7 g/kg, twice a day) or water (control group) were given to rats (3 rats for each group) for 5 consecutive days. Treatment of rats with 0.7 and 1.4 g/kg per day Danggui or Honghua for 5 days caused mild to strong increase of CYP 3A1 and decrease of CYP 2E1 RNA expression. However, only Honghua (0.7 and 1.4 g/kg per day) induced the increase of CYP 1A2 RNA expression, while CYP 2C11 RNA was unaffected by both Danggui and Honghua. These data demonstrated that Danggui or Honghua affected the expression of hepatic CYP isoforms in the rats; they elevated CYP 1A2 and 3A1 RNA expression but inhibited CYP 2E1 RNA expression. Such alterations may change the therapeutic actions of the drugs metabolized primarily by P450 system when they are co-administered to people with Danggui or Honghua. Therefore, patients should be cautioned about the potential drug-herb interactions between Danggui or Honghua and prescription drugs that were metabolized by CYP1A2, 2E1 and 3A1 isoforms.

Strategic Commercial Partnership for Australian Biotech Innovation.

AGT Partners IPD in Anti-Obesity Therapies Development.

Genesis Biomedical Acquires ENSI~MED.

Sulfa Drug Output Increases Despite Declining Demand.

China's Pharmaceutical Retail Market in First Half 2003.

Shanghai Company Collaborates with Inner Mongolia Pharma Group.

Venkateshwara Group Creates New Vaccine Manufacturing Division.

Pfizer India Prioritized as Prime R&D Hub.

Pharmac Caught in Losec Dispute.

Cardinal Health Establishes Singapore Operation.

The Lab Rat Cloned At Last!.

Researchers Closer to Developing Ebola Vaccine.

Spit Here Please — Saliva as a Diagnostic Tool.

Cholesterol-lowering Drug May Alleviate Alzheimer’s.

In this issue, APBN looks at the technology that have improved our understanding of the human body and paved the way for future treatments and therapies.

First off, we learn about pneumococcal vaccination and how it offers protection against bacterial pneumonia with Dr Chew Huck Chin, respiratory physician and intensivist at Mount Elizabeth Novena Hospital. Then, we hear from Yutaka Shimokawa, Founder and CEO of KINS, about how gut microbes can improve women's hormonal health.

In Spotlights, we bring you the highlights from the recent Asia Summit on Global Health as well as an interview with Dr Tan Hong Chang, Senior Consultant at the Singapore General Hospital, and Associate Professor Liu Yu-Chi, Clinician Scientist at the Singapore National Eye Centre, on how a cholesterol drug was repurposed as a new treatment for diabetic corneal neuropathy.

In Columns, Dr Jane Leong, Vice President, Medical Affairs Asia Pacific for Moderna, shares how recent developments in mRNA technology could change the way we approach cancer other diseases.

In this issue, we have two highlights that will look at how far imaging technologies have come since the X-ray. First, Keefe Chee from BD Life Sciences, Singapore, discusses how real-time imaging spectral flow cytometry (RTI-SFC) allows scientists to identify previously unclassifiable cells in real time, bridging a long-standing gap in biomedical research.

And then we have Torrey Smith, CEO of Endiatx, to share with us about PillBot™, the world's first motorised pill camera that will allow a doctor to view the entire stomach and assess for any lesions, making stomach cancer diagnosis more accessible and palatable.

Finally, some research highlights we have this issue include a novel diagnostic tool that will improve the clinical diagnosis of neurodegenerative disorders, a textile that can convert body movement into electricity, and a uterine tissue-specific hydrogel that could aid in infertility.

In an organism, genes encode proteins, some of which in turn regulate other genes. Such interactions work in highly structured but incredibly complex ways, and make up a genetic regulatory network. Recently, nonlinear delay differential equations have been proposed for describing genetic regulatory networks in the state-space form. In this paper, we study stability properties of genetic regulatory networks with time delays, by the notion of delay-independent stability. We first present necessary and sufficient conditions for delay-independent local stability of genetic regulatory networks with a single time delay, and then extend the main result to genetic regulatory networks with multiple time delays. To illustrate the main theory, we analyze delay-independent stability of three genetic regulatory networks in E. coli or zebra fish. For E. coli, an autoregulatory network and a repressilatory network are analyzed. The results show that these two genetic regulatory networks with parameters in the physiological range are delay-independently robustly stable. For zebra fish, an autoregulatory network for the gene her1 is analyzed. The result shows that delay-independent stability of this network depends on the initial number of protein molecules, which is in agreement with the existing biological knowledge. The theories presented in this paper provide a very useful complement to the previous work and a framework for further studying the stability of more complex genetic regulatory networks.

Photothermal therapy is a potential strategy to treat triple-negative breast cancer. The expression of HSP90 in the tumor cells has been identified as a culprit for reducing the effectiveness of photothermal therapy, so using reagents with photothermal conversion to deliver HSP inhibitors can achieve good tumor suppression. However, the potential toxicity of small molecule HSPs inhibitors limits their further application development. Therefore, this study constructed a nanoplatform by graphene oxide (GO) to deliver antisense oligonucleotide (ASO) of HSP90 to improve the therapeutic effect. The photothermal performance of GO was confirmed by infrared thermal imager. MTT results showed that tumor cell viability was lower after the addition of ASO under irradiation. In addition, the result of western blot revealed that the expression of HSP90 decreased by 32% compared to the blank group under the action of ASO. All the above results indicated that our strategy enhances the inhibition of triple-negative breast cancer cells via suppressing the expression of HSP90 in photothermal therapy.

Objectives: To investigate the risk of flare-ups after COVID-19 vaccination in patients with rheumatic disease. Methods: A total of 1,617 patients with rheumatic diseases were identified from three rheumatology clinics. Patients were interviewed for demographic data, disease activity, and vaccination status. Disease flare-up was determined clinically by independent rheumatologists. Change of serum markers and medications were retrieved from medical records. The risk of exacerbation of rheumatic disease, change in serum markers, and escalation of rheumatic medications between vaccinated and nonvaccinated patients were determined using Cox, linear, and logistic regression models, respectively. Possible confounding factors were also taken into consideration. Results: Among 562 (34.76%) patients who received COVID-19 vaccination, rheumatic disease (HR = 2.10, $P<$ 0.001), inflammatory arthritis (HR = 2.71, $P<$ 0.001), rheumatoid arthritis (RA) (HR = 2.03, $P$ = 0.002), spondyloarthritis (SpA) (HR = 4.78, $P<$ 0.001), autoimmune disease (HR = 1.77, $P$ = 0.01), and systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) (HR = 1.99, $P$ = 0.02) were associated with postvaccination clinical flare-up. Adult Still’s disease (B = 12.76, $P$ = 0.03) was associated with increased serum C-reactive protein (CRP). No association was found between vaccination and escalation of rheumatic medication. Subgroup analyses showed that only the mRNA vaccine was associated with flare-ups. Conclusion: COVID-19 vaccination was associated with minor disease flare-up but not escalation of rheumatic medications. In the absence of absolute contraindications, COVID-19 vaccination is recommended in patients with rheumatic disease.

KEY MESSAGES

1. Vaccination is effective in the prevention of morbidity due to COVID-19 in patients with autoimmune diseases.

2. The mRNA vaccine was associated with mild rheumatic disease flare-up.

3. Inactivated virus vaccine is preferable to mRNA vaccine in patients with active autoimmune disease.

Next-generation sequencing has provided rapid collection and quantification of ‘big’ biological data. In particular, multi-omics and integration of different molecular data such as miRNA and mRNA can provide important insights to disease classification and processes. There is a need for computational methods that can correctly model and interpret these relationships, and handle the difficulties of large-scale data. In this study, we develop a novel method of representing miRNA-mRNA interactions to classify cancer. Specifically, graphs are designed to account for the interactions and biological communication between miRNAs and mRNAs, using message-passing and attention mechanisms. Patient-matched miRNA and mRNA expression data is obtained from The Cancer Genome Atlas for 12 cancers, and targeting information is incorporated from TargetScan. A Graph Transformer Network (GTN) is selected to provide high interpretability of classification through self-attention mechanisms. The GTN is able to classify the 12 different cancers with an accuracy of 93.56% and is compared to a Graph Convolutional Network, Random Forest, Support Vector Machine, and Multilayer Perceptron. While the GTN does not outperform all of the other classifiers in terms of accuracy, it allows high interpretation of results. Multi-omics models are compared and generally outperform their respective single-omics performance. Extensive analysis of attention identifies important targeting pathways and molecular biomarkers based on integrated miRNA and mRNA expression.

Duchenne and Becker muscular dystrophies are allelic X-linked disorders resulting from defects in the gene coding for the dystrophin muscle protein. The dystrophin gene is more than 2300kb in size and consists of 79 exons. This large size and complexity presents a challenge to direct identification of point mutations and small deletions that cannot be identified by multiplex deletion testing or Southern blotting. One approach to this problem is to analyse the expression of ectopic dystrophin mRNA transcripts. Although the dystrophin gene transcript is distributed only over approximately 0.1% of the genome, analysis of such ectopic lymphocyte dystrophin transcripts can shed light on the pathogenic events at the transcriptional level.

Calculated folding free energies of mRNA sequences from 33 human genes were each compared to ten step-wise partially shuffled versions of the same sequences, keeping the dinucleotide, or "neighbor", composition preserved. The first ten base-swap steps of the shuffling process were dissected by examining the folding free energies after each base-swap. This whole procedure was repeated a hundred times for each gene. Most of the genes showed a tendency for the average free energy to decline dramatically, suggesting that these natural mRNAs have been subject to selection to maximize the folding free energy. For most of the genes, the direction of average change for these first ten steps was accurately predicted by the mRNA folding Z-scores calculated for thoroughly shuffled sequences. Estimates ranged from 12 to 69.2 as to how many swap steps would be required to match the average free energy for fully shuffled sequences.