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Astragalus membranaceus is a major medicinal herb commonly used in many herbal formulations in the practice of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) to treat a wide variety of diseases and body disorders. Among its diversified clinical applications, the potential use of this herb and its chemical constituents in treatments of inflammatory diseases and cancers has been actively investigated in recent years. Astragalus-based treatments have demonstrated significant amelioration of the toxicity induced by other concurrently administered orthodox drugs (e.g., immunosuppressants and cancer chemotherapeutics). The major components of Astragalus membranaceus are polysaccharides, flavonoids, and saponins. Contemporary use of Astragalus membranaceus mainly focuses on its immunomodulating, anti-oxidant, and anti-inflammatory, as well as anticancer effects. In this paper, we summarize the properties of Astragalus membranaceus and its major constituents in the biological system based on experimental and clinical studies. The antitumorigenic mechanisms of a novel Astragalus saponins extract called AST in treating various gastrointestinal cancers are highlighted. We discuss in detail how the Astragalus herb and AST influence the immune system, modulate various cancer signaling pathways, and interact with specific transcription molecules during protection against gastrointestinal inflammation and cancers. This information could help clinicians and scientists develop novel target-specific and effective therapeutic agents that are deprived of major systemic side effects, so as to establish a better treatment regimen in the battle against inflammatory diseases and cancers of the gut.

Asian ginseng, American ginseng, and notoginseng are three major species in the ginseng family. Notoginseng is a Chinese herbal medicine with a long history of use in many Oriental countries. This botanical has a distinct ginsenoside profile compared to other ginseng herbs. As a saponin-rich plant, notoginseng could be a good candidate for cancer chemoprevention. However, to date, only relatively limited anticancer studies have been conducted on notoginseng. In this paper, after reviewing its anticancer data, phytochemical isolation and analysis of notoginseng is presented in comparison with Asian ginseng and American ginseng. Over 80 dammarane saponins have been isolated and elucidated from different plant parts of notoginseng, most of them belonging to protopanaxadiol or protopanaxatriol groups. The role of the enteric microbiome in mediating notoginseng metabolism, bioavailability, and pharmacological actions are discussed. Emphasis has been placed on the identification and isolation of enteric microbiome-generated notoginseng metabolites. Future investigations should provide key insights into notoginseng’s bioactive metabolites as clinically valuable anticancer compounds.

Many cultivated and wild plants are used for the management of various diseases, specifically renal and hepatic diseases and those of the immune and cardiovascular systems. In China, medicinal plants from ancient to modern history have been used in patients with angina pectoris, congestive heart failure (CHF), systolic hypertension, arrhythmia, and venous insufficiency for centuries. The latest increase in the fame of natural products and alternative medicine has revived interest in conventional remedies that have been consumed in the management of CVD. The cardio-protective properties of the various herbs are possibly due to their anti-oxidative, antihypercholesterolemic, anti-ischemic activities, and inhibition of platelet aggregation that reduce the risk of CVD. Ethno-pharmacological and biological properties of these plants are explored, based upon published scientific literature. Although a majority of medicinal plants having a biological mechanism that linked with CVD management, to date, published literature pertaining to their promising scientific properties are still poorly understood. Compared with synthetic medicines, alternative medicines do not need scientific studies before their formal approval from the government sector and due to this purpose; their safety, as well as efficacy, still remain elusive. Taken together, we addressed all accessible evidence on alternative medicines commonly consumed in CVD management. Our comprehensive analysis of the scientific literature indicated that many TCMs are available and valuable herbal medication would be the best alternative for the management of CVD as a complementary therapy. Furthermore, practitioners should always discuss possible benefits–risks of alternative medicines with patients so that they are aware of the consumption of alternative medications.

The article is about the use and misuse of Ephedra.

GE Healthcare Life Sciences take part in Life-Saving, Olivier Loeillot (GM of Bioprocess Asia).

Cennerv Pharma: A Company that Fights Along with Mental Illnesses.

How Can Cord Blood be Used to Save Lives? Life-Saving Mission of SCBB: An Interview with Dr. William Hwang.

An Interview with Mr. Stephen Ooi, Senior Executive Advisor Zimmer Biomet Asia Pacific.

APACMed – Serving Unmet Healthcare Needs in Asia Pacific, Fredrik Nyberg (CEO of APACMed).

Vaccination, One of the Solutions to Prevent Dengue Infection.

MonaLisa Touch^® Advanced Laser Treatment for Better Life Quality.

Biomedical Engineering Industry Alliance (BME IA): Working in Favour of the Industry's Stakeholders

Counter-Acting Chemotherapy's Side Effects

(Writer's Thought) Treating Patients, Not Diseases

SINGAPORE – NUS Study: Daily Consumption of Tea Protects the Elderly from Cognitive Decline.

SINGAPORE – Singapore Researchers Use Patients’ Stem Cells to Test for Side Effects of Drugs – Discovery Brings Doctors Closer to Personalized Medicine.

UNITED STATES – Diabetes in Your DNA? Scientists Zero in on the Genetic Signature of Risk.

UNITED STATES – Super Resolution Imaging Helps Determine a Stem Cell’s Future.

UNITED STATES – Wearable Biosensors Can Tell You When to See the Doctor.

AUSTRALIA – PromarkerD Predictive Diagnostics for DKD to Roll-out in Asia.

JAPAN – Enrollment Commences in Phase III Clinical Study of Eisai’s BACE Inhibitor Elenbecestat in Early Alzheimer’s Disease in Japan.

The symptoms of cancer or its recurrence must be distinguished from the early and late side effects of anti-cancer treatment, other drugs, or unrelated concomitant illnesses. Symptoms of cancer may be directly due to the effects of the primary tumour or its metastases on surrounding tissue, or the manifestations of paraneoplastic syndromes, which are distant effects often mediated by hormones or cytokines, but not directly due to the local effect of tumour. Systemic symptoms of cancer include weight loss, fatigue, pruritus and fever and sweats, which must be distinguished from unrelated illnesses. Organ-specific cancers cause symptoms either due to the mass effect, such as tumour blockage of hollow passages like the airways, gastrointestinal tract or urogenital tract, or cause organ dysfunction, as may occur in the liver or lungs. Pain may occur with nerve compression, blockage of hollow organs, or the stretching of organ capsules, as occurs in the liver.

The side effects of chemotherapy are part of the differential diagnosis of symptoms which could mimic those of conditions unrelated to the cancer. Examples include emesis, infection, anaemia, or cumulative organ toxicities. Some toxicities manifest themselves very late after the treatment, such as second cancers and sterility.

Motivation: Social media is a largely untapped source of information on side effects of drugs. Twitter in particular is widely used to report on everyday events and personal ailments. However, labeling this noisy data is a difficult problem because labeled training data is sparse and automatic labeling is error-prone. Crowd sourcing can help in such a scenario to obtain more reliable labels, but is expensive in comparison because workers have to be paid. To remedy this, semi-supervised active learning may reduce the number of labeled data needed and focus the manual labeling process on important information.

Results: We extracted data from Twitter using the public API. We subsequently use Amazon Mechanical Turk in combination with a state-of-the-art semi-supervised active learning method to label tweets with their associated drugs and side effects in two stages. Our results show that our method is an effective way of discovering side effects in tweets with an improvement from 53% F-measure to 67% F-measure as compared to a one stage work flow. Additionally, we show the effectiveness of the active learning scheme in reducing the labeling cost in comparison to a non-active baseline. Availability: Code and data will be published on https://github.com/kramerlab.