Profile of vismodegib and its potential in the treatment of advanced basal cell carcinoma.

Basal cell carcinoma (BCC) is the most common human malignancy. Recent advances in our understanding of the critical biologic pathways implicated in the development and progression of BCC have led to the development of the first molecular targeted therapy for this disease. The hedgehog pathway is mutated in virtually all patients with BCC and recent trials with vismodegib, an inhibitor of this pathway, have shown significant responses. This review will discuss the importance of the hedgehog pathway in the pathogenesis of BCC and describe in detail the pharmacology of vismodegib in relation to its activity in advanced BCC

A survey of animal neoplasms

Call number: LD2668 .T4 1959 S3

Sweet syndrome: a sweet disease with a bitter diagnosis

Sweet syndrome is an acute febrile neutrophilic dermatosis first described by Robert Douglas Sweet in 1964. Sweet syndrome presents in three clinical settings: classical (or idiopathic), malignancy-associated, and drug-induced. It has been associated with hematopoietic malignancies and myelodysplastic disorders. A-28-years married woman presented to us with chief complaints of Fever and Multiple swellings over the body since 2 months. At presentation she has Pallor; venous hum present. Multiple, tender, erythematous subcutaneous swellings, firm in consistency noted in both forearms. Skin over the swellings is pinchable; superficial skin is normal. Sweet syndrome can occasionally cause an intense systemic response involving the lungs, liver and musculoskeletal system. The skin lesions in Sweet syndrome typically start as erythematous papules, plaques, and nodules. The lesions can take on pseudovesicular or pseudopustular appearance, and sometimes fully formed vesicles or pustules develop. The lesions can be subcutaneous mimicking erythema nodosum which can’t be differentiated unless a biopsy is taken. Because the diagnosis of Sweet syndrome can be challenging, particularly when associated with other connective tissue disorders such as SLE, a set of diagnostic criteria were proposed initially by Su and Liu and then revised by Von den Driesch. The diagnosis is based upon the presence of two major and two of the four minor criteria. Concurrent Sweet syndrome and SLE are exceedingly rare. Twelve patients with both Sweet syndrome and systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) have been previously reported. We report a case of sweet syndrome associated with SLE diagnosed in our hospital. In our patient, diagnostic criteria are satisfied for Sweet syndrome as well as for SLE (ACR criteria-patient had polyarthralgia, anemia, thrombocytopenia, ANA and Ds DNA positive. Four out of 11 are fulfilled for SLE). Patient responded to corticosteroids

Testing morphodynamic controls on the location and frequency of river avulsions on fans versus deltas: Huanghe (Yellow River), China

A mechanistic understanding of river avulsion location and frequency is needed to predict the growth of alluvial fans and deltas. The Huanghe, China, provides a rare opportunity to test emerging theories because its high sediment load produces regular avulsions at two distinct nodes. Where the river debouches from the Loess plateau, avulsions occur at an abrupt decrease in bed slope and reoccur at a time interval (607 yrs) consistent with a channel-filling timescale set by the superelevation height of the levees. Downstream, natural deltaic avulsions reoccur at a timescale that is fast (7 yrs) compared to channel-filling timescale due to large stage-height variability during floods. Unlike the upstream node, deltaic avulsions cluster at a location influenced by backwater hydrodynamics and show evidence for episodic downstream migration in concert with progradation of the shoreline, providing new expectations for the interplay between avulsion location, frequency, shoreline rugosity and delta morphology

Anti-Inflammatory Activity of Calotropis gigantea and Tridax procumbens on Carrageenin-Induced Paw Edema in Rats

The anti-inflammatory activities of extract of Calotropis gigantea R.Br. and Tridax procumbens Linn., were assessed on carrageenin-induced paw edema along with standard drug, Ibuprofen. The Ibuprofen significantly reduced paw edema at the dose of 200mg/Kg bw orally. The oral administration equi-effective dose (ED50) of C. gigantea (600mg/Kg bw) and T. procumbens (400 mg/Kg bw) individually revealed about 20-35% more activity than the one rendered by administration of 50mg/Kg bw of Ibuprofen. The effect of C. gigantea and T. procumbens along with various dose regimen of Ibuprofen showed greater anti-inflammatory activities than the Ibuprofen alone

Database Learning: Toward a Database that Becomes Smarter Every Time

In today's databases, previous query answers rarely benefit answering future queries. For the first time, to the best of our knowledge, we change this paradigm in an approximate query processing (AQP) context. We make the following observation: the answer to each query reveals some degree of knowledge about the answer to another query because their answers stem from the same underlying distribution that has produced the entire dataset. Exploiting and refining this knowledge should allow us to answer queries more analytically, rather than by reading enormous amounts of raw data. Also, processing more queries should continuously enhance our knowledge of the underlying distribution, and hence lead to increasingly faster response times for future queries. We call this novel idea---learning from past query answers---Database Learning. We exploit the principle of maximum entropy to produce answers, which are in expectation guaranteed to be more accurate than existing sample-based approximations. Empowered by this idea, we build a query engine on top of Spark SQL, called Verdict. We conduct extensive experiments on real-world query traces from a large customer of a major database vendor. Our results demonstrate that Verdict supports 73.7% of these queries, speeding them up by up to 23.0x for the same accuracy level compared to existing AQP systems.Comment: This manuscript is an extended report of the work published in ACM SIGMOD conference 201