Recent Findings on Therapeutic Cancer Vaccines: An Updated Review.

Cancer remains one of the global leading causes of death and various vaccines have been developed over the years against it, including cell-based, nucleic acid-based, and viral-based cancer vaccines. Although many vaccines have been effective in in vivo and clinical studies and some have been FDA-approved, there are major limitations to overcome: (1) developing one universal vaccine for a specific cancer is difficult, as tumors with different antigens are different for different individuals, (2) the tumor antigens may be similar to the body's own antigens, and (3) there is the possibility of cancer recurrence. Therefore, developing personalized cancer vaccines with the ability to distinguish between the tumor and the body's antigens is indispensable. This paper provides a comprehensive review of different types of cancer vaccines and highlights important factors necessary for developing efficient cancer vaccines. Moreover, the application of other technologies in cancer therapy is discussed. Finally, several insights and conclusions are presented, such as the possibility of using cold plasma and cancer stem cells in developing future cancer vaccines, to tackle the major limitations in the cancer vaccine developmental process.

Inhibitory Impacts of Fulvic Acid-Coated Iron Oxide Nanoparticles on the Amyloid Fibril Aggregations.

Alzheimer's disease is considered as multi-factor diseases, the main hallmarks of which are extracellular amyloid-beta and intracellular tau protein aggregations, leading to neural death. With this in mind, most of the studies have been focused on eliminating these aggregations. Fulvic acid is one of the polyphenolic compounds which exhibits strong anti-inflammation and anti-amyloidogenic effects. On the other hand, iron oxide nanoparticles are able to reduce/eliminate the amyloid aggregations. Here in, the effect of fulvic acid-coated iron-oxide nanoparticles on the commonly used in-vitro model for amyloid aggregation studies, i. e., lysozyme from chicken egg white was investigated. The chicken egg white lysozyme forms the amyloid aggregation under acidic pH and high heat. The average size of nanoparticles was 10.7±2.7 nm. FESEM, XRD, and FTIR confirmed that fulvic acid was coated onto the surface of the nanoparticles. The inhibitory effects of the nanoparticles were verified by Thioflavin T assay, CD, and FESEM analysis. Furthermore, the toxicity of the nanoparticles on the neuroblastoma SH-SY5Y was assessed through MTT assay. Our results indicate that these nanoparticles efficiently inhibit amyloid aggregation formation, while exhibiting no in-vitro toxicity. This data shed light on the anti-amyloid activity of the nanodrug; paving the way for future drug development for treating Alzheimer's disease.

Z-scan optical method complements the Thioflavin T assay for investigation of anti-Alzheimer's impact of polyphenols.

Polyphenols are effective in eliminating amyloid-beta aggregations, the main hallmark of Alzheimer's disease. Various nano drugs and biomaterials based on polyphenolic compounds have been synthetized to treat or prevent Alzheimer's disease, and the main in-vitro approach to investigate the anti-Alzheimer's properties of materials, is the Thioflavin T assay. While useful it has drawbacks and in particular cannot always guarantee the accuracy of data, specifically in cases of polyphenolic compounds; thus, in this situation accurate results requires utilizing other assays along with Thioflavin T. In this experiment, we introduced the Z-scan technique as a complementary test for Thioflavin T assay. In this study, the anti-Alzheimer's properties of two polyphenols quercetin and fulvic acid were assessed in the presence and absences of silver nanoparticles at various concentrations, both via Z-scan technique and Thioflavin T assay, after which the two tests were aligned with each other. The polyphenols' non-linear refractive indices obtained by the Z-scan technique correlated well with their related fluorescence intensities from the Thioflavin T assay in such a way that, the smaller the magnitude of the non-linear refractive indices, the stronger the anti-amyloidogenic impact. Our work shows that Z-scan could be used along with Thioflavin T for enhanced investigation of polyphenols' anti-Alzheimer's properties.