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Colorectal cancer is one of the most commonly diagnosed incurable multifactorial malignancies in the world. To date, there are no promising noninvasive therapeutic tools that have achieved CRC prognosis, survival, and recurrence in clinical settings. We are now very familiar with the most famed term “metabolic reprogramming” that cancer cells preferably employ to meet their rapid bioenergetic and ATP synthesis requirements. Glutamine is the most abundant amino acid in human blood plasma and is known for its significant pleotropic role in the metabolic network.

Multiple dengue virus (DENV) serotypes circulating in a geographical area most often lead to simultaneous infection of two or more serotypes in a single individual. The occurrence of such concurrent infections ranges from 2.5 to 30 per cent, reaching as high as 40-50 per cent in certain dengue hyper-endemic areas. Concurrent dengue manifests itself differently than mono-infected patients, and it becomes even more important to understand the effects of co-infecting serotypes in concurrent infections to ascertain the clinical outcomes of the disease progression and transmission. In addition, there have also been reports of concurrent DENV infections in the presence of other arboviral infections. In this review, we provide a comprehensive breakdown of concurrent dengue infections globally. Furthermore, this review also touches upon the clinical presentations during those concurrent infections categorized as mild or severe forms of disease presentation. Another aspect of this review was aimed at providing insight into the concurrent dengue incidences in the presence of other arboviruses.

Pancreatic cancer is the deadliest of human cancers to date. The hostile nature of pancreatic cancer, mostly due to its tendency for early local and distant spread, is in due course responsible for poor diagnosis and reduced survival. Most of the pancreatic cancers are originated in exocrine glands. About 95% of these exocrine cancers are adenocarcinomas that affect the pancreatic ducts. Other types of pancreatic cancers include neuroendocrine cancers that arise in endocrine cells. But these provide extensive capillary networks for metastasis of tumor cells. Several computational approaches are employed to couple the gene expression measurements with a network of known relationships between gene products, like the NetRank algorithm similar to Google’s PageRank algorithm, to determine the marker genes that are better involved in clinical outcome prediction. One such marker genes are those that encode transcription factors. One important group is E2F transcription factor family. These regulate a varied range of cellular functions, which include cell differentiation, cell proliferation, and cell death. The current chapter focuses on the E2F1 transcription factor, its mechanism of regulating the cell cycle, and its role in apoptosis and metastasis in context with the devastating pancreatic cancer. The insights into the molecular mechanisms with further investigation and research may provide improved diagnostic and treatment options for this type of cancer.

Hypoxia-inducible factor-1 (HIF-1) is a regulatory protein, mainly responsible for maintaining oxygen homeostasis in response to reduced oxygen concentration in cells and tissues. The protein is a heterodimer which consists of subunit HIF-α and HIF-β. It is an important transcription factor involved in the transcriptional regulation of many genes related to embryonic development, metabolism, cell proliferation, angiogenesis, metastasis, and response to radiation therapy, making it an important regulator in most cancer therapies. Esophageal cancer (EC) is not a well-studied and a poorly understood cancer. It is highly aggressive in nature with poor survival rate. Its mortality rate ranks sixth among all cancers. Overexpression studies of HIF-1 in correlation with other target gene expressions revealed its role in both upregulation and downregulation of certain molecules in particular cancer types. Considering all parameters, HIF-1 inhibitor could present a potential approach to cancer therapy. This chapter summarizes the potential roles of HIF-1α in cell cycle, proliferation, apoptosis, and metastasis and future perspectives in targeting esophageal cancer for developing novel anticancer therapies.

Hepatitis E virus (HEV) is a positive-sense RNA virus and member of the genus Orthohepevirus in the family Hepeviridae. Although HEV RNA-dependent RNA polymerase (HEV-RdRp) plays an important role in the HEV life cycle, its template specificities are not completely understood. We expressed HEV-RdRp protein with His-tag in a bacterial system and analysed template specificities using different putative cis-regulatory elements in the HEV genome. The enzyme showed highest affinity for the 3′ non-coding region (NCR), then for the 5′NCR and least for the putative subgenomic promoter (SgP). The enzyme could co-bind to 3′NCR and putative SgP templates together, as evident from the supershift in binding assay, indicating presence of different binding sites for these elements. Proteomic analysis revealed that the RNA elements share two common peptides for binding, while a third peptide, which is highly conserved across different HEV genotypes, is specific for 3′NCR. We propose that, during the early phases of replication, as negative sense antigenome copies accumulate at the replication site, they probably initiate promoter swapping from 3′NCR to SgP, to favour synthesis of subgenomic RNA and to prevent synthesis of genomic RNA. The conserved site for 3′NCR binding could be potential antiviral target and needs further evaluation.