The ambitious goal of this volume is to provide - in chapters written by accomplished scientists and experts in their field - a comprehensive overview of the currently available information related to the therapeutic utility of adult bone marrow-derived cells. With excitement generated almost daily about the possible uses of stem cells to treat human disease, but the controversy surrounding their use still raging, adult bone-marrow derived cells are more readily available, and have a staggering range of uses.

This book describes antibiotic resistance amongst pathogenic bacteria. It starts with an overview of the erosion of the efficacy of antibiotics by resistance and the decrease in the rate of replacement of redundant compounds. The origins of antibiotic resistance are then described. It is proposed that there is a large bacterial resistome which is a collection of all resistance genes and their precursors in both pathogenic and non-pathogenic bacteria. Ongoing resistance surveillance programs are also discussed, together with the perspective of a clinical microbiologist. The book then turns to...

Has the neuromuscular junction been over-exposed or is it perhaps already a closed book? I asked myself this at a recent International Congress when an American colleague complained that the Journal of Physiology had articles on nothing but the neuromuscular junction, while another colleague asked why I was editing a volume on a subject about which everything was already known. It is worrying to think that these views may be shared by other people. I hope that this volume will convince my two colleagues and other readers that the neuromuscular junction is very much alive and continues to...

Bradykinin is frequently referred to as an elusive substance; the editor of a comprehensive volume dealing with kinins thus has a difficult task. The com- plexity of the issues calls for a large number of contributors who approach the topics from the various angles that are dictated by the sometimes divergent views of the individuals. The editor saw no reason to prescribe the mode of presentation, which was left to the authors and accounts for the variety of approaches. Contributors from nine countries were asked to participate in the volume. The chapters were organized to present, first, the...

This volume of the Handbook of Experimental Pharmacology (Concepts in Biochemical Pharmacology) will show that pharma- cology has finally arrived as a true discipline in its own right, and is no longer the handmaiden of organic chemistry and physiology. Instead it is an amalgam of all the biological sciences including biochemistry, biophysical chemistry, physiology, pathology and clinical medicine. In the volumes that make up Concepts in Bioche- mical Pharmacology we hope to convince Medical Schools what should now be obvious, that pharmacology is no longer that dull topic bridging the basic...

If the numerous therapeutic acquisitions of the past few years have enriched very different fields of human pathology, it does seem that coronary pathology has been given very special attention, as witness the wide variety of antianginal medications placed at the disposal of the medical profession. There are various explanations for this state of affairs, one of them probably being that the medica- tions successively proposed do not fully satisfy the practitioner and another that the total number of individuals suffering from the clinicaI manifestations of coronary heart disease offers, by...

This volume of the Handbook of Experimental Pharmacology (Concepts in Biochemical Pharmacology) will show that pharma- cology has finally arrived as a true discipline in its own right, and is no longer the handmaiden of organic chemistry and physiology. Instead it is an amalgam of all the biological sciences including biochemistry, biophysical chemistry, physiology, pathology and clinical medicine. In the volumes that make up Concepts in Bio- chemical Pharmacology we hope to convince Medical Schools what should now be obvious, that pharmacology is no longer that dull topic bridging the basic...

The history of arterial hypertension is both long and short; long, since BRIGHT (1827) first related hardness of the pulse to hardness of the kidneys and hyper. trophy of the heart; short in that modern research began in the late twenties. Most of what we know of these diseases has been discovered in the past fifty years. The modern story should have begun in 1897 when an extract of kidney was shown to be pressor. But little was done with knowledge until about 1929 when the relationship of this kidney extract called "renin" to hypertension was pos- tulated. The pressor effects were, however,...

Over the past two decades a number of attempts have been made, with varying degrees of success, to collect in a single treatise available information on the basic and applied pharmacology and biochemical mechanism of action of antineoplastic and immunosuppressive agents. The logarithmic growth of knowledge in this field has made it progressively more difficult to do justice to all aspects of this topic, and it is possible that the present handbook, more than four years in preparation, may be the last attempt to survey in a. single volume the entire field of drugs em- ployed in cancer...