Search

Sclerotic chronic graft-versus-host disease (ScGVHD) or systemic sclerosis (SSc) is one of the most severe manifestations of chronic graft-versus-host disease (cGVHD) since the involvement of major organs significantly affects the mortality and morbidity of SSc patients. Currently, there are no effective therapeutic approaches or standard "second-line" therapy for SSc. Imatinib, a clinical tyrosine kinase inhibitor used to treat chronic myeloid leukemia and gastrointestinal tumor, has shown potential therapeutic effects in treating ScGVHD or SSc. Due to the current limitations of clinical trials using Imatinib in the treatment of SSc, the results vary among different studies, and the applications of Imatinib in SSc is still in vagueness. Here we conducted a single-arm meta-analysis to quantitatively and systematically interpret the results of previous studies, as to evaluate the potential therapeutic effect of Imatinib in SSc. The pooled clinical response rate (CRR) showed that Imatinib had higher CRR in SSc patients with longer disease duration (CRR = 0.550) and lung involvement (CRR = 0.601) than those without (P<0.001). Therefore, it was encouraging to conduct future clinical studies regarding Imatinib therapy in SSc patients, since the global response rate of Imatinib was higher than expected in specific subgroup patients. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A sensitive LC-ESI-MS/MS method for determination of isochlorogenic acid B in rat plasma was developed and validated in the present study. Plasma samples were prepared by a simple protein precipitation with methanol containing resveratrol as internal standard (IS). The chromatographic separation was performed on a Zorbax SB-C18 column (3.5 μm, 2.1 mm×100 mm, Agilent, USA) at a flow rate of 0.2 mL/min using methanol/water containing 0.1% formic acid (v/v) as mobile phase. The detection was performed on a triple quadrupole tandem mass spectrometer equipped with Electronic Spray Ion by selected reaction monitoring (SRM) of the transitions at m/z 515.3→352.9 for isochlorogenic acid B and m/z 227.1→143.1 for IS, respectively. The calibration curve of the method was linear over the range of 5-2500 ng/mL (r2 = 0.9982). The intra- and inter-day precisions (R.S.D.%) were less than 12.46%, and the accuracy (R.E.%) was within ±5.80%. Isochlorogenic acid B was sufficiently stable under all relevant analytical conditions. The validated method was successfully applied to the plasma pharmacokinetic studies of isochlorogenic acid B in rats. It was found that isochlorogenic acid B had non-linear pharmacokinetic characteristics in rats within the dosage ranges from 5 to 20 mg/kg. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]