Honey and Diabetes: The Importance of Natural Simple Sugars in Diet for Preventing and Treating Different Type of Diabetes

Diabetes is a metabolic disorder with multifactorial and heterogeneous etiologies. Two types of diabetes are common among humans: type 1 diabetes that occurs when the immune system attacks and destroys insulin and type 2 diabetes, the most common form, that may be caused by several factors, the most important being lifestyle, but also may be determined by different genes. Honey was used in folk medicine for a long time, but the health benefits were explained in the last decades, when the scientific world was concerned in testing and thus explaining the benefits of honey. Different studies demonstrate the hypoglycemic effect of honey, but the mechanism of this effect remains unclear. This review presents the experimental studies completed in the recent years, which support honey as a novel antidiabetic agent that might be of potential significance for the management of diabetes and its complications and also highlights the potential impacts and future perspectives on the use of honey as an antidiabetic agent

Harnessing the power of genomics and immunoinformatics to produce improved vaccines

The role of cellular immunity as a mediator of protection against disease is gaining recognition, particularly with regard to the many pathogens for which we presently lack effective vaccines. As a result, there is an ever-increasing need to understand the T-cell populations induced by vaccination and, therefore, T-cell epitopes responsible for triggering their activation. Although the characterization and harnessing of cellular immunity for vaccine development is an active area of research interest, the field still needs to rigorously define T-cell epitope specificities, above all, on a genomic level. New immunoinformatic epitope mapping tools now make it possible to identify pathogen epitopes and perform comparisons against human and microbial genomic data sets. Such information will help to determine whether adaptive immune responses elicited by a vaccine are both pathogen-specific and protective, but not crossreactive against host or host-associated sequences that could jeopardize self-tolerance and/or human microbiome–host homeostasis. Here, we discuss advances in genomics and vaccine design and their relevance to the development of safer, more effective vaccines

A Method for Individualizing the Prediction of Immunogenicity of Protein Vaccines and Biologic Therapeutics: Individualized T Cell Epitope Measure (iTEM)

The promise of pharmacogenomics depends on advancing predictive medicine. To address this need in the area of immunology, we developed the individualized T cell epitope measure (iTEM) tool to estimate an individual's T cell response to a protein antigen based on HLA binding predictions. In this study, we validated prospective iTEM predictions using data from in vitro and in vivo studies. We used a mathematical formula that converts DRB1* allele binding predictions generated by EpiMatrix, an epitope-mapping tool, into an allele-specific scoring system. We then demonstrated that iTEM can be used to define an HLA binding threshold above which immune response is likely and below which immune response is likely to be absent. iTEM's predictive power was strongest when the immune response is focused, such as in subunit vaccination and administration of protein therapeutics. iTEM may be a useful tool for clinical trial design and preclinical evaluation of vaccines and protein therapeutics

The cellular magnetic response and biocompatibility of biogenic zinc- and cobalt-doped magnetite nanoparticles.

The magnetic moment and anisotropy of magnetite nanoparticles can be optimised by doping with transition metal cations, enabling their properties to be tuned for different biomedical applications. In this study, we assessed the suitability of bacterially synthesized zinc- and cobalt-doped magnetite nanoparticles for biomedical applications. To do this we measured cellular viability and activity in primary human bone marrow-derived mesenchymal stem cells and human osteosarcoma-derived cells. Using AC susceptibility we studied doping induced changes in the magnetic response of the nanoparticles both as stable aqueous suspensions and when associated with cells. Our findings show that the magnetic response of the particles was altered after cellular interaction with a reduction in their mobility. In particular, the strongest AC susceptibility signal measured in vitro was from cells containing high-moment zinc-doped particles, whilst no signal was observed in cells containing the high-anisotropy cobalt-doped particles. For both particle types we found that the moderate dopant levels required for optimum magnetic properties did not alter their cytotoxicity or affect osteogenic differentiation of the stem cells. Thus, despite the known cytotoxicity of cobalt and zinc ions, these results suggest that iron oxide nanoparticles can be doped to sufficiently tailor their magnetic properties without compromising cellular biocompatibility