Targeting microbiota : What do we know about it at present?

Publisher Copyright: © 2019 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.The human microbiota is a variety of different microorganisms. The composition of microbiota varies from host to host, and it changes during the lifetime. It is known that microbiome may be changed because of a diet, bacteriophages and different processes for example, such as inflammation. Like all other areas of medicine, there is a continuous growth in the area of microbiology. Different microbes can reside in all sites of a human body, even in locations that were previously considered as sterile; for example, liver, pancreas, brain and adipose tissue. Presently one of the etiological factors for liver disease is considered to be pro-inflammatory changes in a host’s organism. There are lot of supporting data about intestinal dysbiosis and increased intestinal permeability and its effect on development of liver disease pointing to the gut–liver axis. The gut–liver axis affects pathogenesis of many liver diseases, such as chronic hepatitis B, chronic hepatitis C, alcoholic liver disease, non-alcoholic liver disease, non-alcoholic steatohepatitis, liver cirrhosis and hepatocellular carcinoma. Gut microbiota has been implicated in the regulation of brain health, emphasizing the gut–brain axis. Also, experiments with mice showed that microorganisms have significant effects on the blood–brain barrier integrity. Microbiota can modulate a variety of mechanisms through the gut–liver axis and gut–brain axis. Normal intestinal flora impacts the health of a host in many positive ways, but there is now significant evidence that intestinal microbiota, especially altered, have the ability to impact the pathologies of many diseases through different inflammatory mechanisms. At this point, many of the pathophysiological reactions in case of microbial disbyosis are still unclear.publishersversionPeer reviewe

Changes in the Development of Social Policy in a Small Island Economy: Malta

This paper analyses the development of social policies in Malta, with a particular focus on events which have impacted on the country’s growth and subsequently on its social security system and policies involving housing, health, education migration and employment. In recent decades, with costs to sustain an ever-growing web of social services becoming more demanding, governments have tried to encourage more self-help and to lessen the heavy dependence on aid structures within the system, pushed at times by recommendations from regional and international institutions. The smaller the economy the more open it is likely to be. Consequently, it is impacted relatively stronger by external events. A heavy reliance on trade, migration and foreign direct investment necessitates balancing the interplay between external and internal activities. These horizontal interdependencies together with the decolonisation process impacted on Malta’s development of social policies and its social security system. Vertical interdependencies had a lesser impact on social policy in the early stages but have in recent years influenced its gradual transformation from a welfare state to a welfare society. The analysis shows that Malta’s social policies aided its economic development strategy in that different social policies sought to provide an equitable society. However, strains and long-term deficits in public finances later showed up the cracks in the structures, which became overused, abused and too wide encompassing. Malta faces challenges which may impact the sustainability of some policies, such as health, while instigating further government intervention in others, such as social housing. A more holistic perspective of all social policies is called for

UB Knightlines Fall 2011

The UB Knightlines newsletter for Fall 2011. This issue contains articles discussing UB Commencement, campus renovations, UB alum Prayana Rana helping immigrants displaced by war, international programs at UB, UB alum Dr. Brian Nathanson using chiropractic techniques to help cancer patients and starting CT Row for a Cure, the naming of a health science classroom after the late Robert Crayhon, UB teaming up with anti-smoking groups, UB and American University of Antigua School of Medicine agreement, UB Singers performing an Carnegie Hall, UB students winning the annual competition at the American Association of Naturopathic Physicians Convention, the careers of UB Baseball alums Peter Barrows and T.J. O'Leary, the success of UB Baseball, the academic success of UB Women Swimmers, the 15th annual University of Bridgeport Athletics Department Golf Classic, and other campus and sports news

Santa Fe New Mexican, 09-01-1905

https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/sfnm_news/7124/thumbnail.jp

Mount Vernon Democratic Banner June 18, 1896

Mount Vernon Democratic Banner was a newspaper published weekly in Mount Vernon, Ohio. Until 1853, it was published as the Democratic Banner.https://digital.kenyon.edu/banner1896/1029/thumbnail.jp

Empire Under the Microscope

This open access book considers science and empire, and the stories we tell ourselves about them. Using British Nobel laureate Ronald Ross (1857-1932) and his colleagues as access points to a wider professional culture, Empire Under the Microscope explores the cultural history of parasitology and its relationships with the literary and historical imagination between 1885 and 1935. Emilie Taylor-Pirie examines a wealth of archival material including medical lectures, scientific publications, popular biography, and personal and professional correspondence, alongside novels, poems, newspaper articles, and political speeches, to excavate the shared vocabularies of literature and medicine. She demonstrates how forms such as poetry and biography; genres such as imperial romance and detective fiction; and modes such as adventure and the Gothic, together informed how tropical diseases, their parasites, and their vectors, were understood in relation to race, gender, and nation. From Ancient Greece, to King Arthur’s Knights, to the detective work of Sherlock Holmes, parasitologists manipulated literary and historical forms of knowledge in their professional self-fashioning to create a modern mythology that has a visible legacy in relationships between science and society today

Characterisation of the expression of tumour antigens and biomarkers in myeloid leukaemia and ovarian cancer

A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Creative Arts, Technologies and Science, University of Bedfordshire in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of PhilosophyAcute myeloid leukaemia (AML) and ovarian cancer (OVC) are two difficult to treat cancers. AML is often treatable however minimal residual disease (MRD) endures such that many patients who achieve remission eventually relapse and succumb to the disease. OVC affects approximately 7000 women in the U.K. every year. It can occur at any age but is most common after menopause. Diagnosis at an early stage of disease greatly improves the chances of survival however, patients tend to be diagnosed in the later stages of disease when treatment is often less effective. Immunotherapy has the potential to reduce MRD and delay or prevent relapse. In order for immunotherapy to work, tumour antigens need to be identified and characterised so they can be effectively targeted. Personalised treatments require the identification of biomarkers, for disease detection and confirmation, as well as to provide an indication of best treatment and the prediction of survival. PASD1 has been found to be frequently expressed in haematological malignancies and I wanted to determine if there was a correlation between the presence of antigen-specific T cells in the periphery of patients with AML and PASD1 protein expression in the leukaemic cells. The expression of other leukaemia antigens were concurrently examined as comparators. I performed RT-PCR on nine antigens and immunocytochemistry on PASD1 in 18 samples from AML patients. I found a correlation between PASD1 expression in AML samples and the presence of PASD1-specific T cells as detected on the pMHC array. OVC lacks suitable targets for immunotherapy with few CTAs having been identified. I examined the expression of SSX2IP and the CTAs PASD1 and SSX2 in OVC. I compared the protein expression of these known tumour antigens to the “gold standard” biomarker for the diagnosis of OVC, CA125 and two other proteins known to be promising in the diagnosis of OVC, HE4 and WT1. I analysed commercially available paraffin-embedded OVC multiple tissue arrays (MTAs) containing 191 samples, predominantly stage I (n= 166), II (n= 15) and III (n= 6) OVC as well as healthy donor (n= 8) and normal adjacent tissues (n= 8). Scoring was performed in a single blinded fashion. I found SSX2A to be expressed at a score level of 3 with a frequency (37/191) that exceeded that of CA125 (14/191), HE4 (14/191), WT1 (1//191) or PASD1 (0/191). To confirm this expression I used two additional commercially-available antibodies that recognise the region common to SSX2A and B, and an antibody specific for SSX2A. Using SSX2 peptides, I blocked the immunolabelling of SSX2 in SSX2-positive cell lines showing that the immunolabelling of SSX2 and SSX2A was specific. I demonstrated that the expression of SSX2 and specifically SSX2A was reproducible and restricted to ovarian cancer with little or no expression in endometrial tissues, or diseased or inflamed endometrial tissue. In summary, these studies demonstrated that PASD1 expression in leukaemia cells correlated with the presence of PASD1-specific T cells in the periphery of presentation AML patients. I have shown that PASD1 specific-T cells are present in AML patients at diagnosis and that immunotherapy targeting PASD1 could be used to break tolerance and clear residual leukaemia cells during first remission. Analysis of the expression of three antigens in OVC, identified the specific expression of SSX2, in particular SSX2A in OVC but not healthy or diseased endometrial tissues. The expression of SSX2A was more frequent and more specific to OVC, than HE4 and WT1, and more frequent at higher intensity, especially in early stage OVC, than CA125. SSX2 and explicitly SSX2A requires further investigation to determine whether the high level of background at score 2 can be reduced with better blocking of non-specific sites. This may require the use of different SSX2 antibodies or an improved staining protocol