Recombinant snakebite antivenoms: A cost-competitive solution to a neglected tropical disease?

Snakebite envenoming is a major public health burden in tropical parts of the developing world. In sub-Saharan Africa, neglect has led to a scarcity of antivenoms threatening the lives and limbs of snakebite victims. Technological advances within antivenom are warranted, but should be evaluated not only on their possible therapeutic impact, but also on their cost-competitiveness. Recombinant antivenoms based on oligoclonal mixtures of human IgG antibodies produced by CHO cell cultivation may be the key to obtaining better snakebite envenoming therapies. Based on industry data, the cost of treatment for a snakebite envenoming with a recombinant antivenom is estimated to be in the range USD 60-250 for the Final Drug Product. One of the effective antivenoms (SAIMR Snake Polyvalent Antivenom from the South African Vaccine Producers) currently on the market has been reported to have a wholesale price of USD 640 per treatment for an average snakebite. Recombinant antivenoms may therefore in the future be a cost-competitive alternative to existing serum-based antivenoms

Systemic analysis of the response of Aspergillus niger to ambient pH

Systems modeling of Aspergillus niger under different pH conditions reveals novel pH-regulated metabolic genes and signaling genes in the pal/pacC pathway

Transcriptomic signatures classifying CHO Quasispecies

Chinese hamster ovary (CHO) cell lines have the capacity to correctly fold, assemble and modify proteins post-translationally, and consequently is commonly used expression systems for recombinant therapeutic proteins. In recent years, a thorough understanding of process parameters of individual CHO cell lines have been achieved, but comprehending the genomic or pathway-specific distinction of various CHO cell lines at transcriptome level still remains a challenge. To address this challenge i.e. to gain cell line specific understanding of modulation in the pathways and gene sets, an RNA-seq study of CHOS, CHOK1 and DG44 cell lines grown in batch culture has been performed using an in-house developed pipeline. An R-based application was developed specifically for this CHO dataset to further calculate expression values across different cell lines. Furthermore, two main conditions have been defined to perform differential expression (DE) analysis to study regulatory activity across the cell lines. First, we performed a DE analysis of exponential and stationary phase of different cell lines where gene sets having significant DE (p\u3c0.05) was identified. And the second one is DE comparison for both phases disjointedly and collectively over cell lines was conducted and genes with p\u3c0.05 was identified. Among the identified up- and down-regulated genes, unique and common genes across phases and cell lines were identified. Additionally, specific pathways have been found to be regulated similarly across various cell lines and some to be transversely regulated over phases. We have thereby mapped the cell line-specific genetic regulation. This can be implemented in picking desired characters, across various CHO cell lines and in determining the structure of super CHO cell lines having the capability to combat most of the deficiencies exiting till today

Transcriptomic signatures classifying CHO quasispecies

Chinese hamster ovary (CHO) cell lines have the capacity to correctly fold, assemble and modify proteins post-translationally, and consequently is commonly used expression systems for recombinant therapeutic proteins. In recent years, a thorough understanding of process parameters of individual CHO cell lines have been achieved, but comprehending the genomic or pathway-specific distinction of various CHO cell lines at transcriptome level still remains a challenge. To address this challenge i.e. to gain cell line specific understanding of modulation in the pathways and gene sets, an RNA-seq study of CHOS, CHOK1 and DG44 cell lines grown in batch culture was performed using an in-house developed pipeline. An R-based CHO gene expression visualization application was developed specifically for CHO dataset to further visualize expression values across different cell lines. Further, distinction between various CHO cell lines were identified by performing differential expression analysis on some selected pathways related to metabolic and cellular processes. Consequently, most efficient cell lines were picked on the basis of process and pathway specific gene networks. Furthermore, two main conditions i.e. p-value \u3c 0.05 and log fold change of 1 was applied to perform differential expression (DE) analysis to study gene network across the cell lines. Among the identified up- and down-regulated genes, unique and common genes across cell lines were identified. Additionally, specific pathways were found to be similarly regulated and some to be transversely regulated across various cell lines. We have thereby mapped the cell line-specific genetic regulation. This can be implemented in picking desired characters, across various CHO cell lines and in determining the structure of super CHO cell lines having the capability to combat most of the deficiencies exiting till today

Continuous variable entanglement distillation of Non-Gaussian Mixed States

Many different quantum information communication protocols such as teleportation, dense coding and entanglement based quantum key distribution are based on the faithful transmission of entanglement between distant location in an optical network. The distribution of entanglement in such a network is however hampered by loss and noise that is inherent in all practical quantum channels. Thus, to enable faithful transmission one must resort to the protocol of entanglement distillation. In this paper we present a detailed theoretical analysis and an experimental realization of continuous variable entanglement distillation in a channel that is inflicted by different kinds of non-Gaussian noise. The continuous variable entangled states are generated by exploiting the third order non-linearity in optical fibers, and the states are sent through a free-space laboratory channel in which the losses are altered to simulate a free-space atmospheric channel with varying losses. We use linear optical components, homodyne measurements and classical communication to distill the entanglement, and we find that by using this method the entanglement can be probabilistically increased for some specific non-Gaussian noise channels