Lung adenocarcinoma promotion by air pollutants

A complete understanding of how exposure to environmental substances promotes cancer formation is lacking. More than 70 years ago, tumorigenesis was proposed to occur in a two-step process: an initiating step that induces mutations in healthy cells, followed by a promoter step that triggers cancer development1. Here we propose that environmental particulate matter measuring ≤2.5 μm (PM2.5), known to be associated with lung cancer risk, promotes lung cancer by acting on cells that harbour pre-existing oncogenic mutations in healthy lung tissue. Focusing on EGFR-driven lung cancer, which is more common in never-smokers or light smokers, we found a significant association between PM2.5 levels and the incidence of lung cancer for 32,957 EGFR-driven lung cancer cases in four within-country cohorts. Functional mouse models revealed that air pollutants cause an influx of macrophages into the lung and release of interleukin-1β. This process results in a progenitor-like cell state within EGFR mutant lung alveolar type II epithelial cells that fuels tumorigenesis. Ultradeep mutational profiling of histologically normal lung tissue from 295 individuals across 3 clinical cohorts revealed oncogenic EGFR and KRAS driver mutations in 18% and 53% of healthy tissue samples, respectively. These findings collectively support a tumour-promoting role for PM2.5 air pollutants and provide impetus for public health policy initiatives to address air pollution to reduce disease burden

Microencapsulation of fish oil using supercritical antisolvent process

In order to improve the encapsulation process, a newly supercritical antisolvent process was developed to encapsulate fish oil using hydroxypropyl methyl cellulose as a polymer. Three factors, namely, temperature, pressure, and feed emulsion rate were optimized using response surface methodology. The suitability of the model for predicting the optimum response value was evaluated at the conditions of temperature at 60°C, pressure at 150 bar, and feed rate at 1.36 mL/min. At the optimum conditions, particle size of 58.35 μm was obtained. The surface morphology of the micronized fish oil was also evaluated using field emission scanning electron microscopy where it showed that particles formed spherical structures with no internal voids. Moreover, in vitro release of oil showed that there are significant differences of release percentage of oil between the formulations and the results proved that there was a significant decrease in the in vitro release of oil from the powder when the polymer concentration was high

Building the e-science grid in the UK: middleware, applications and tools deployed at level 2

Over the period September 2002-April 2003 the UK Grid Engineering Task Force and staff at Regional e-Science Centres and CCLRC deployed the Globus Toolkit GT2 at 14 sites and on approximately 80 compute resources to set up the first production-quality e-Science Grid for the UK. This work is proving to be exemplary of what can be achieved using heterogeneous resources on a national scale and is feeding discussions on how to link Grids with multiple virtual organisations across Europe. This paper therefore reports on experiences of this deployment exercise, compares with other efforts worldwide and suggests further work to be done

Mn0.8Zn0.2Fe2O4 nanoparticulates spinel ferrites: An approach to enhance the antenna field strength for improved magnitude versus offset (MVO)

Electromagnetic signals in deep reservoir are very weak so that it is difficult to predict about the presence of hydrocarbon in seabed logging (SBL) environment. In the present work, Mn0.8Zn0.2Fe2O4 nanoferrites were prepared by a sol–gel technique at different sintering temperatures of 450 °C, 650 °C and 850 °C to increase the strength of electromagnetic (EM) antenna. XRD, FESEM, Raman spectroscopy and HRTEM were used to analyze the phase, surface morphology and size of the nanoferrites. Magnetic properties of the nanoferrites were also measured using an impedance network analyzer. However, nanoferrites sintered at 850 °C with initial permeability of 200 and Q factor of 50 were used as magnetic feeders with the EM antenna. Lab scale experiments were performed to investigate the effect of magnetic field strength in scale tank. SPSS and MATLAB softwares were also used to confirm the oil presence in scale tank. It was observed that the magnitude of the EM waves for the antenna was increased up to 233%. Finally, the correlation values also show 208% increase in the magnetic field strength with the presence of the oil. Therefore, antenna with Mn0.8Zn0.2Fe2O4 nanoferrites based magnetic feeders can be used for deep water and deep target hydrocarbon exploration