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Muhammad Imran bin Hussin
198811

What is penicillin?

Penicillin, one of the first and still one of the most widely used antibiotic agents. Penicillin is a type of antibiotics that is derived from the Penicillium mold.

When it is first discovered?

In 1928 Scottish bacteriologist Alexander Fleming first observed that colonies of the bacterium Staphylococcus aureus failed to grow in those areas of a culture that had been accidentally contaminated by the green mold Penicillium notatum. He isolated the mold, grew it in a fluid medium, and found that it produced a substance capable of killing many of the common bacteria that infect humans. Australian pathologist Howard Florey and British biochemist Ernst Boris Chain isolated and purified penicillin in the late 1930s, and by 1941 an injectable form of the drug was available for therapeutic use. Another naturally occurring penicillin, penicillin V was later isolated from the same mold.

How penicillin works?

All penicillins work in the same way, by inhibiting the bacterial enzymes responsible for cell wall synthesis in replicating microorganisms and by activating other enzymes to break down the protective wall of the microorganism. As a result, they are effective only against microorganisms that are actively replicating and producing cell walls; they also therefore do not harm human cells (which fundamentally lack cell walls).

What are penicillins used for?

Penicillins may be used to treat a wide range of infections caused by susceptible bacteria, such as:

Dental abscess

Ear infections (eg, otitis media)

Gonorrhea

Pneumonia

Respiratory tract infections

Rheumatic fever

Scarlet fever

Skin infections

Urinary tract infections

What are the differences between penicillins?

The several kinds of penicillin synthesized by various species of the mold Penicillium may be divided into two classes:

·         naturally occurring penicillins

o   Examples: Penicillin G & Penicillin V

·         Semi-synthetic penicillin

o   Examples: ampicillin, carbenicillin and oxacillin.

How safe is penicilins?

Penicillins are generally safe, with low toxicity and good efficacy against susceptible bacteria.

Even though many people believe that they are allergic to penicillin, but the reality is that true penicillin allergy is rare, and only occurs in 0.01-0.05% of people who take penicillin. Symptoms may include nausea, vomiting, itchy skin, rash, wheezing, swelling around the throat, and respiratory collapse.

Does penicillin have it side effects?

Yes. Penicillins generally cause few side effects. The most common side effects reported include abdominal pain, headache, rash, diarrhea, and taste perversion.

Penicillins may cause anaphylaxis in those allergic to penicillin, but the overall incidence of anaphylaxis is rare (0.01-0.05%).

Rarely, some people may develop a super-infection due to overgrowth of a naturally occurring bacterium called Clostridium difficile, following use of any antibiotic, including penicillins. Symptoms may include severe diarrhea.

Uncommonly, an overgrowth of the yeast, Candida albicans, may occur following penicillin use, resulting in the symptoms of thrush.

References:

·         https://www.britannica.com/science/penicillin

·         https://www.🤬.com/drug-class/penicillins.html

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NUR SUHADAH BINTI ABDUL KAHAR
197461

continue.......

Lets look at the steps more clearly. First, the plasmid is cut across both strands by a restriction enzyme, leaving loose, sticky ends to which DNA can be attached. Then, special linking sequences are added to the human cDNA so that it will fit precisely into the loose ends of the opened plasmid DNA ring.After that, the plasmid containing the human gene, also called a recombinant plasmid, is now ready to be inserted into another organism, such as a bacterial cell. The recombinant plasmids and the bacterial cells are then mixed up. Plasmids enters the bacteria in a process called transfection. With the recombinant DNA molecule successfully inserted into the bacterial host, another property of plasmids can be exploited - their capacity to replicate. Once inside a bacterium, the plasmid containing the human cDNA can multiply to yield several dozen copies.When the bacteria divide, the plasmids are divided between the two daughter cells and the plasmids continue to reproduce. With cells dividing rapidly (every 20 minutes), a bacterium containing human cDNA (encoding for insulin) will shortly produce many millions of similar cells (clones) containing the same human gene.

Plasmid: Plasmids are small circles of DNA found in bacteria cells, separate from the bacterial chromosome and smaller than it. They are able to pass readily from one cell to another, even when the cells are clearly from different species, far apart on the evolutionary scale. Consequently, plasmids can be used as vectors, permitting the reproduction of a foreign DNA by using the bacterial replicating system.

cDNA: Human genes composed of coding and non- coding sequences. The copy of the coding sequences is called cDNA. It can be obtained from the reverse transcription of messenger RNA.
The transcription and translation of the insulin cDNA will allow the production of a functional insulin molecule.

From: BIO. "Biology in Perspective." Washington, D.C.: Biotechnology Industry Organization, 1990.

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Name
Noor Elieza Binti Mior Muhammad Ariffin
Matric number
196999

Skin graft is one of the most indispensable techniques in plastic surgery and dermatology.

Skin grafts are used in a variety of clinical situations, such as traumatic wounds, defects after oncologic resection, burn reconstruction, scar contracture release, congenital skin deficiencies, hair restoration, vitiligo, and -areola reconstruction.

Skin grafts are generally avoided in the management of more complex wounds. Conditions with deep spaces and exposed bones normally require the use of skin flaps or muscle flaps.

If possible, a doctor takes healthy skin from areas that are usually covered by clothes or are not easily seen. You will have a bandage over the skin graft. The area may be sore for 1 to 2 weeks. Keep the area of the skin graft dry while it heals, unless your doctor gives you other instructions.

Below are some of the information about Epidermal Growth Factor:

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NUR FATIN ADRIANA BINTI ZOLKEPLI
199016

Antivenom works by stimulating the production of antibodies. It also highly specialised warrior proteins released by your immune system to neutralise dangerous antigens like viruses, baacteria or like in this case, venom. Antivenom can’t destroy a venom’s toxins or reverse its ill effects. But the antibodies they create can smother them, preventing further spread and rendering them harmless.

How to make a antivenom?

Step 1: get some venom.

To make antivenom, we need venom. Antivenom also called as antivenin, venom antiserumand antivenom immunoglobulin. To make an antidote for venom, we need to get a lot of venom. Get a deadly snake and open its mouth over a vial and gently squeeze its venom glands until they’re empty.

Step 2: freeze the venom

Once the snake is milked, the venom is freeze-dried to cincentrate and preserve it

step 3: use some other animal to make antibodies

Find a horse, sheep or goat and inject them with little doses of the venom again and again over several weeks. This allow the animals to build antibodies and fight off the venom. The antibodies peak after a couple of months, at which point they can be harvested. Which mean that up to 6 liters of blood is typically drained from the animal’s jugular. And don’t worry the animal isn’t bled to death. It will live on to enjoy the process all over again.

Step 4: purify, concentrate and deliver

After bloodletting is done, you filter out the antibodies, and the purify nd concentrate them into dose vials. If need to store it up for the next snake-handling encounter, then stash it in the freezer.

The fact that antivenom must be kept cold poses a serious problem for developing countries with scarce electricity. Unfortunately, those tend to be the same places that are inundated with killer snakes. Making antivenom is expensive and time-consuming, ehich is one reasons why it suffers global supply shortages all the time. A single vial may cost over 1500dolar and a victim may require 20 to 30 vials to fully recover from a serious bite.

But there is other way, bill haast and he is half-liter of snake spit. He practiced a form of mithridatism, the process of making yourself immune to a toxin by gradually taking non-lethal amounts. He milked 100 snakes a day with his bare hands and made his own decidedly lower-tech, antivenom leaving the horses out of it and using his own body. He pretty much single-handedly saved 21 snakebite victims by flying around the world, donating transfusions of his own blood. He lived to be 100 years old, surviving 172 snake bites, and losing one finger.

reference: http://www.who.int/snakebites/treatment/Antivenom_treatments/en/

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Each Individual in Group 1 & 2 should contribute unique postings from one another to the e-bulletin board based on related color code. Provide Name & Matrics no. in your posting

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by, AMIRA NURNISA BINTI AZMI (198509)

Stem cells are unspecialized cells that develop into the specialized cells that make up the different types of tissue in the human body. Stem cells are defined as cells that have self-renewing capabilities and differentiate into multiple cell lineages. They are characterized by the ability to renew themselves through mitotic cell division and differentiating into a diverse range of specialized cell types. They are vital to the development, growth, maintenance, and repair of our brains, bones, muscles, nerves, blood, skin, and other organs .Stem cells are found in all of us, from the early stages of human development to the end of life. While stem cell based treatments have been established as a clinical standard of care for some conditions, such as hematopoietic stem cell transplants for leukemia and epithelial stem cell-based treatments for burns and corneal disorders, the scope of potential stem cell-based therapies has expanded in recent years due to advances in stem cell research.

1.       Scientists at Newcastle University in England create the first ever artificial liver cells using umbilical cord blood stem cells in October 2006

2.       Mario Capecchi, Martin Evans, and Oliver Smithies won the 2007 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for their work on embryonic stem cells from mice using gene targeting strategies producing genetically engineered mice (known as knockout mice) for gene research.

3.       The first published study of successful cartilage regeneration in the human knee using autologous adult mesenchymal stem cells is published by clinicians from Regenerative Sciences in 2008.

4.       Human embryonic stem cells (hESCs) are generated by transferring cells from a preimplantationstage embryo into a plastic laboratory culture dish that contains a nutrient broth known as culture medium.

5.       Bone marrow transplants (BMT) are a well-known clinical application of stem cell transplantation. BMT can repopulate the marrow and restore all the different cell types of the blood after high doses of chemotherapy and/or radiotherapy, our main defense used to eliminate endogenous cancer cells. The isolation of additional stem and progenitors cells is now being developed for many other clinical applications.

6.       Stem cells can provide dopamine - a chemical lacking in victims of Parkinson’s disease. It involves the loss of cells which produce the neurotransmitter dopamine. The first double-blind study of fetal cell transplants for Parkinson’s disease reported survival and release of dopamine from the transplanted cells and a functional improvement of clinical symptoms

7.      Embryonic stem cell cultivation. The zygote undergoes successive mitotic divisions until a sphere of cells—the blastocyst—is formed. In the blastocyst, the trophoblast at its periphery generates the embryonic membranes and placenta, whereas the inner cell mass develops into the fetus. Embryonic stem cells are immortal in culture, having been established from one pluripotent cell collected from the inner cell mass. These are capable of differentiating into any of the mature cell types present in the adult organism.

8.      Production of induced pluripotent stem (IPS) cells. IPS cells are produced by treating mature cells, such as fibroblasts, with genes that ‘dedifferentiate' them to a pluripotent stage, similar to an embryonic stem cell. Viral vectors, such as retroviruses, are generally used for gene transfer. The transformed cells become morphologically and biochemically similar to pluripotent stem cells, with the advantage of representing autologous cells in therapeutic applications.

9.       Cell Stem Cell and Trends in Biotechnology (TIBTECH) doing tissue-engineering research using stem cell technologies

References:

1)    ISSUE: TISSUE ENGINEERING| VOLUME 36, ISSUE 4, P337-339, APRIL 01, 2018,’Engineering a Strong Bond between Stem Cells and Biotechnology’

2)      Biology of stem cells: an overview Pedro C Chagastelles ¹ and Nance B Nardi 1,2

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4089750/

3)      Curr Pharm Biotechnol. 2011 Nov;12(11):1760-73.Stem cells in pharmaceutical biotechnology.’https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21902635’

4)  http://www.imedpub.com/articles/stem-cell-basics-classification-andapplications.pdf

Production of induced pluripotent stem (IPS) cells

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Siti Nurazlia binti Azlan
199261

Another development in biotechnology is the discovery of monoclonal antibodies. Monoclonal antibodies are antibodies produced in the laboratory by a single cell. The single cell is formed by the union of two other cells—a cancer cell and an animal cell that makes a particular antibody. The hybrid cell multiplies rapidly, making clones of itself and producing large quantities of the antibody. (Antibodies are chemicals produced in the body that fight against foreign substances, such as bacteria and viruses.) Monoclonal antibodies are used in research, medical testing, and for the treatment of specific diseases.

How they work?
A MAB works by recognising and finding specific proteins on cells. Some work on cancer cells, others target proteins on cells of the immune system. Each MAB recognises one particular protein. They work in different ways depending on the protein they are targeting.

How you have them?
You have MAB treatment as an injection under the skin (subcutaneous injection), or through a drip (infusion) into a vein. For some 🤬, you have your first treatment into your vein, then further treatments as an injection under your skin.

How often you have treatment and how many treatments you need will depend on:

·         which MAB you have

·         the type of cancer you have

Side effects?
All treatments have side effects. These can vary depending on the type of MAB you have.
Before you have some types of MAB you might need to have tests using some of your cancer cells or a blood sample to find out whether the treatment is likely to work.

References:

1.https://www.cancerresearchuk.org/about-cancer/cancer-in-general/treatment/immunotherapy/types/monoclonal-antibodies
2.http://www.scienceclarified.com/Bi-Ca/Biotechnology.html

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NUR SUHADAH BINTI ABDUL KAHAR
197461

Insulin was the first pharmaceutical protein produced using genetically engineered bacteria (Thomas et al. 2002).  Insulin originally was isolated from cows and pigs that were slaughtered for food.  This method was inefficient and caused some patients to develop allergies from the animal-derived insulin.  Today it is made from the human gene that codes for the insulin protein and is expressed and cloned in the bacterium, Escherichia coli.  Large quantities of E. coli are now grown in fermentation vats to make tons of human insulin available to the growing number of diabetic patients.

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Embryonic stem cell cultivation

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NOR SYAKIRAH BINTI ZAINAL (196666)

WHAT IS VACCINES?

An antigenic substance prepared from the causative agent of a disease or a synthetic substitute, used to provide immunity against one or several diseases.

DNA VACCINE

DNA vaccines are another promising new type of vaccination. Because DNA can be manipulated much more easily than proteins or living organisms, the development of DNA vaccines raises the possibility that new vaccines, or vaccines against new organisms, could be generated and distributed quickly—within weeks of identifying a pathogenic organism.

In one version of this approach (developed at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas), fragments of DNA that direct the synthesis of protein antigens specific to that organism are generated by polymerase chain reaction (PCR) from the genome of the organism. The assembled piece of DNA is mixed with other DNA constructs that direct the synthesis of cytokines or proteins (e.g., interleukin-12) that stimulate the immune response. Gold spheres with slight surface roughness are mixed with the DNA, and the spheres are shot (using a gene gun) into the skin of the animal being immunized. Some of the DNA is taken up by dendritic cells in the skin and presented to the immune system, which initiates the process leading to an immune response.

The ultimate promise of this technology is the deconvolution of a pool of genes in a whole-genome, shotgun approach in a few weeks, as opposed to years. To identify the particular genes that would confer immunity, the researcher could take all of the potential antigen-encoding DNA, break it into pieces, amplify it using PCR, express it in mice, and find the products that render the mouse immune to infection.

SUBUNIT VACCINES

Most modern vaccines are subunit vaccines, that is, vaccines that contain one or more molecules or parts of molecules that carry the immunological properties of an organism, which in turn can elicit the immune response. Generically, the process of generating a subunit vaccine for an organism involves a survey of organisms that had been infected with the infectious agent and recovered to determine which antigens provoked an immune response. Those antigens, typically proteins, are then manufactured, typically as recombinant proteins expressed in bacteria, yeast, or cultured animal cells. The recombinant proteins are typically mixed with an adjuvant and injected into test animals to determine if they confer immunity. Based on these animal studies, the mix of antigens and adjuvants can be fine tuned. Eventually, trials are conducted in humans.

Recombinant DNA technology and immunology were successfully used in the search for the surface antigen of an invading organism and the development of a recombinant vaccine for hepatitis B. The tools and methodologies for this concept are well proven and could be easily extended to other systems.

Moving from flu vaccine in chicken eggs or vaccinia from cow pustules, to cultures of pure organisms in vitro to recombinant proteins from those organisms, leads to well defined and pure vaccines. Less complex vaccine products, such as recombinant proteins and DNA, are generally easier to manufacture and characterize. Therefore, reproducible, consistent processes might be developed for producing them at reasonable cost and on reasonable schedules.

REFERENCE
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK207433/

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by:
Ram Kumaar Pillai A/L Shanmugavel
197002
How cool it would be if one could live longer than the expected lifetime given? Especially to those who drinks and spoil their kidney at early ages. What's on your mind now? Organ transplant? No.This is because since there aren’t enough organs available, the United States has instituted national lists for heart and liver transplants. In the future, that could change. Scientists are experimenting with by using organs from other animals with similar internal functions, such as pigs.Under Biotechnology, It was initially discovered that the pig genome contains porcine endogenous retroviruses (PERVs) , However, if they were to mix with human DNA, it could lead to catastrophic results.

But scientists were able to deactivate the PERVs in porcine cells using the CRISPR CAS-9 enzyme. In theory, this could pave the way for human organs to, one day, be grown in pigs or for pig organs to be transplanted into humans. This cool innovation could help humans live longer lives.

Thank you.
Reference:  https://online.husson.edu/cool-innovations-biotechnology/