Biomedical subjects

K E Peuschel

Publications and source records attributed to K E Peuschel.

5 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2005

Antiviral therapy with non-selective beta-blockers: preliminary experimental and clinical corroboration.

Treatment with non-selective beta-blockers has been proposed to have an indirect antiviral activity acting via an enhanced performance of the immune system, and the mechanism of this activity has been laid out earlier. Experimental and clinical findings are presented that corroborate the hypothesis that inhibiting the immunosuppressive and stress-related cAMP-PKA pathway will enhance the immune system's ability to recognize foreign antigen and to access its vast repertory in an improved way, resulting in an indirect antiviral activity. Other drugs having an inhibitory effect on the cAMP-PKA pathway in cells of the immune system and therefore expected to have a comparable activity spectrum with different specific side-effects are presented, for example aspirin. Additionally the so far unexplained anticancer activity of aspirin is related to the same mechanism of an enhanced performance of the immune system.

Adrenergic beta-Antagonists↗

PubMed2000

New insights into the annealing behaviour of DNA.

In mutagenesis experiments with megaprimers of length 450-770 bp optimal annealing of the megaprimer to the template-DNA was shown to occur at unexpectedly low temperatures under conditions suboptimal for amplification of the elongated megaprimer-product by the short flanking primers, although very high annealing temperatures would have been expected to give best results. This finding contradicts the rule that annealing temperatures should be just below the melting temperature of a given primer, and leads to the conclusion that the curves of melting and annealing temperatures diverge rather than running in parallel.

DNA↗

PubMed2000

Pitfalls in prion research.

Prion research seems to get increasingly enigmatic since the protein only hypothesis has been established as almost the only working hypothesis. This may indicate that the hypothesis could be wrong, and should prompt the search for potential faults in past experiments. In fact some problematic experiments can be pinpointed, for example determination of the N-terminal cleavage site of the prion protein PrP, of the structure of PrP as determined by NMR, some conclusions concerning the function of PrP from gene knockout experiments including potential evidence against the protein only hypothesis, and some aspects of the prion purification procedure.

Animals↗

PubMed1997

A genetic defect of an iron pump on chromosome 20 is postulated to cause human hemochromatosis.

Hemochromatosis is postulated to be caused by a heterozygous or homozygous defect of a gene on the short arm of the human chromosome 20 coding for an ubiquitous iron carrier membrane protein responsible for transporting iron ions out of cells. This iron pump would be very important to stabilize the membrane potential and to avoid excessive intracellular storage of iron with the consequence of damage to cells by lipid peroxidation of membranes.

Chromosomes, Human, Pair 20↗

PubMed1995

A new approach to antiviral therapy.

A new approach to antiviral therapy is proposed, taking advantage of the recently investigated innervation of immune tissues by the sympathetic nervous system, which establishes a functional connection between the nervous and the immune system, where the sympathetic nervous system exerts a varying tonic inhibitory influence on cellular activation via secretion of norepinephrine and reception thereof by beta-receptors on leukocytes. Simultaneous beta-adrenergic blockade of leukocytes and stress-related centres of the central nervous system (paraventricular nucleus of the hypothalamus) is suggested as immunoactivating therapy in presence of foreign antigen. Immunoactivation is newly defined as facilitated activation of the immune system in presence of foreign antigen and is theoretically correlated with indirect antiviral and antitumoral activity.

Adjuvants, Immunologic↗