Maja Marasović

In vitro and in vivo antitumor activity of the halogenated boroxine dipotassium-trioxohydroxytetrafluorotriborate (K2[B3O3F4OH])

Abstract Dipotassium-trioxohydroxytetrafluorotriborate K2[B3O3F4OH] was listed as a promising new therapeutic for cancer diseases. For in vitro and in vivo investigation of its antitumor effects 4T1 mammary adenocarcinoma, B16F10 melanoma and squamous cell carcinoma SCCVII were used. The detailed in vitro investigation undoubtedly showed that K2[B3O3F4OH] affects the growth of cancer cells. The proliferation of cells depends on the concentration so that aqueous solution of K2[B3O3F4OH], the concentrations of 10−4 M and less, does not affect cell growth, but the concentrations of 10−3 M or more, significantly slows cells growth. B16F10 and SCCVII cells show higher sensitivity to the cytotoxic effects of K2[B3O3F4OH] compared to 4T1 cells. Under in vivo conditions, K2[B3O3F4OH] slows the growth of all three tumors tested compared to the control, and the inhibitory effect was most pronounced during the application of the substance. There is almost no difference if K2[B3O3F4OH] was applied intraperitoneally, intratumor, peroral or as ointment. Addition of 5-FU did not further increase the antitumor efficacy of K2[B3O3F4OH].

In vitro and in vivo antitumour effects of phenylboronic acid against mouse mammary adenocarcinoma 4T1 and squamous carcinoma SCCVII cells.

Abstract The cytotoxic activity of phenylboroxine acid was evaluated in vitro on mouse mammary adenocarcinoma 4T1, mouse squamous cell carcinoma SCCVII, hamster lung fibroblast V79 and mouse dermal fibroblasts L929 cell lines. The cytotoxic effects were dose dependent for all tested tumour and non-tumour cell lines. Under in vivo conditions, three application routes of phenylboronic acid were studied: intra-peritoneal (i.p.), intra-tumour (i.t.) and per-oral. After tumour transplantation in syngeneic mice, phenylboronic acid was shown to slow the growth of both tumour cell lines (4T1 and SCCVII) compared with the control. The inhibitory effects were pronounced during the application of phenylboronic acid. For both tested tumour cell lines, the most prominent antitumour effect was obtained by intraperitoneal administration, followed significantly by oral administration.

Robust Nonlinear Regression in Enzyme Kinetic Parameters Estimation

Accurate estimation of essential enzyme kinetic parameters, such as and , is very important in modern biology. To this date, linearization of kinetic equations is still widely established practice for determining these parameters in chemical and enzyme catalysis. Although simplicity of linear optimization is alluring, these methods have certain pitfalls due to which they more often then not result in misleading estimation of enzyme parameters. In order to obtain more accurate predictions of parameter values, the use of nonlinear least-squares fitting techniques is recommended. However, when there are outliers present in the data, these techniques become unreliable. This paper proposes the use of a robust nonlinear regression estimator based on modified Tukey’s biweight function that can provide more resilient results in the presence of outliers and/or influential observations. Real and synthetic kinetic data have been used to test our approach. Monte Carlo simulations are performed to illustrate the efficacy and the robustness of the biweight estimator in comparison with the standard linearization methods and the ordinary least-squares nonlinear regression. We then apply this method to experimental data for the tyrosinase enzyme (EC 1.14.18.1) extracted from Solanum tuberosum, Agaricus bisporus, and Pleurotus ostreatus. The results on both artificial and experimental data clearly show that the proposed robust estimator can be successfully employed to determine accurate values of and .