The establishment of a modified method to evaluate angiogenesis of rat rings in serum-free medium was investigated in this paper. The aorta rings of Wistar rats were embedded in fibrinogen gel in 48 well plates, and cultured in an optimized serum free medium MCDB131. Results indicated that new capillaries spouted on 4th day, and entered into growth phase from 6th day, and peaked on 13th day and remained unchanged thereafter.

Epithelial-mesenchymal-transition(EMT) plays a key role in the formation of embryo.At present,it is believed that EMT also contribute to the metastasis of primary tumors.A lot of signaling pathways participate in EMT,such as Wnt/?-catenin,Notch,Hedgehog,TGF? and growth factor receptors.The drugs that affect these pathways may play an important part in oncotherapy.

Protein Kinase C(PKC) plays a key role in carcinogenesis and metastasis,therefore,PKC is the potential molecular target to develop the treatments of cancer.Currently several PKC inhibitors have entered the clinical research stage,at the same time they also bring new challenges to research and development of anti-cancer drugs targeting PKC.The article will review the recent role of PKC in cancer and the progress of inhibitors targeting PKC.

Protein biochips industry has been making significant progress recently. It played a role in the discovery-oriented proteomics, but now the research emphasis turns to the study of important functional proteins. The emergence of the low density protein biochip technique facilitated this study conversion. This technology has advantages of low cross-reaction, high signal intensity and good precision. This paper reviewed various medical and pharmaceutical applications of the low density protein biochips in disease diagnostics and monitoring, drug discovery and testing, as well as molecular interaction and signaling pathways.

It is well known that oligosaccharides in glycoproteins and glycolipids play crucial roles in a variety of cellular functions, such as proliferation, differentiation, and intercellular communications. The oligosaccharides of cell are increasingly being recognized as one of the most prominent biochemical alterations associated with malignant transformation and tumorigenesis. Glycosylations in different cell cycle and cell growth periods are significantly distinct, and these differences affect the cell cycle progression. In the past decades, along with the advances in genomics and proteomics, the functional significance of cancer-associated changes in glycosylation has been revealed. Eukaryotic organisms depend on an intricate and evolutionary conserved cell cycle to control cell devision. Mistakes in cell cycle process lead to cancer. This review highlights the relations between cell cycle and glycosylation changes in cancer cells.

DNA topoisomerase is a basic enzyme in eucaryon and prokaryotic cells, which distributes in cell nucleus generally. DNA topoisomerase plays important roles in the process of duplication, transcription, translation, recombination and chromosome monomer isolation to control, keep and modify the DNA topology. It is reported that DNA topoisomerase has a high expression level, which related with the mechanism of many antitumor drugs.

More and more interest has been put on the investigations of saccharides recent years. Saccharides have a vast number of bioactivities and the immunomodulating effect of saccharides is one of the important mechanisms via which saccharides exert their bioactivities. Saccharides exert their bioactivities mainly by interacting with all kinds of saccharide receptors on cells, followed by a series of signal transduction process. In the present paper, numerous saccharide receptors and the characters of the mutual interaction between saccharides and their receptors are summarized.

Integrin is an important cellular adhesion molecule,which mediates many biologic actions such as cell-cell adhesion or cell-extracellular matrix adhesion.The relationship between integrin and tumor metastasis,as well as the important role of integrin during tumor progress,is reviewed in this article,which gives us the theoretical base for new pathways of cancer treatment.

The atherogensis was involved in a complex pathological process. Injury to endothelial cells of blood vessels was confirmed to be the in itial stage of this process. Migration to subendothelial layer and accumulation and proliferation of smooth muscle cells were attributed to various cytokines an d adhesive molecules secreted by activated endothelial cells, subsequently resul ting in aggregation of lymphocytes,platelets, monocytes and macrophages in the i ntima of artery. These cellular components ultimatedly led to the formation of a mature atherosclerotic plaque. Its quite acknowledged that a better understan ding of the atherogenic events might promise us the development of new chemical entities of anti-atherosclerotic therapies. A large body of evidence has demons trated that sulfated polysaccharides played a critical role in the development o f atherosclerosis. The underlying mechanisms of the anti-atherosclerotic activi ty of sulfated polysaccharides were reported to contribute to protecting against endothelial cells injury,inhibiting migration and proliferation of vascular smo oth muscle cells, and reducing the adhesion of inflammatory cells, platelets and lymphocytes. And also, the prevention of complement activation by sulfated poly saccharides could not be excluded. On the other hand,the promoting effects of su lfated polysaccharides atherosclerosis was also reported. Its therefore conclu ded that the relationships between atheriosclerosis and sulfated polysaccharides remained to be further elucidated.

The effects of D-polymannuronic sulfate (DPS) on the norepinephrine (NA) or potassium chloride (KCL)-induced contraction of rat aortic rings were studied in this paper. The results showed that DPS at the final concentration of Img ? L-1 inhibited the contraction of aortic rings e-voked by NA or KCL and shift doseresponse curves for NA or KCL to the right in a non-parallel fa-sion and depressed their maximal response, implicating that DPS afforded the noncompetitive antagonism on contraction of rat aortic rings induced by NA or KCL. This finding suggested that DPS exerted an inhibitory action of potential-dependent calcium channel and that of receptor-operated calcium channel in vascular smooth muscle.