13 research outputs found
Glutamine protects small intestinal mucosa
Supportive therapy during chemotherapy has become essential, but effective preventive therapies to gastrointestinal mucosal injury are few. We investigated the efficacy of glutamine in rat anticancer drug-induced enteritis model. In this study, we used twenty male SD rats. They were divided into control, 5-fluorouracil (5-FU) (orally administered at 20mg/kg day), 5-FU+glutamine (1000 mg/kg/day) and 5-FU+glutamine+fiber and oligosaccharide (GFO[āR]) (1000 mg/kg/day) groups. All groups were sacrificed on day 6 and upper jejunums were excised. The jejunal villous height was measured in specimens. IgA level in jejunal washing solution, and serum diamine oxidase activity were also measured. The jejunal villous height was recognized as shorter in the specimen from 5-FU treated rats compared with 5-FU+glutamine treated rats (p<0.001). Serum diamine oxidase activity in 5-FU+glutamine group were significantly superior to that in 5-FU group (p=0.028). IgA level in jejunal washing solution tended to be higher in 5-FU+glutamine group than that in 5-FU group (p=0.076). On the other hand, serum diamine oxidase activity and IgA level in jejunal washing solution showed no significant difference between 5-FU+GFO and 5-FU treatment group. Our results suggest that glutamine showed protective effects on mucosal injury of small intestine in rat anticancer drug-induced enteritis model
Asking the right questions for mutagenicity prediction from BioMedical text
Abstract Assessing the mutagenicity of chemicals is an essential task in the drug development process. Usually, databases and other structured sources for AMES mutagenicity exist, which have been carefully and laboriously curated from scientific publications. As knowledge accumulates over time, updating these databases is always an overhead and impractical. In this paper, we first propose the problem of predicting the mutagenicity of chemicals from textual information in scientific publications. More simply, given a chemical and evidence in the natural language form from publications where the mutagenicity of the chemical is described, the goal of the model/algorithm is to predict if it is potentially mutagenic or not. For this, we first construct a golden standard data set and then propose MutaPredBERT, a prediction model fine-tuned on B i o L i n k B E R T based on a question-answering formulation of the problem. We leverage transfer learning and use the help of large transformer-based models to achieve a Macro F1 score of >0.88 even with relatively small data for fine-tuning. Our work establishes the utility of large language models for the construction of structured sources of knowledge bases directly from scientific publications
Evaluation of two prognostic indices for adult Tācell leukemia/lymphoma in the subtropical endemic area, Okinawa, Japan
Aggressive adult Tācell leukemia/lymphoma (ATL) has an extremely poor prognosis and is hyperendemic in Okinawa, Japan. This study evaluated two prognostic indices (PIs) for aggressive ATL, the ATLāPI and Japan Clinical Oncology Group (JCOG)āPI, in a cohort from Okinawa. The PIs were originally developed using two different Japanese cohorts that included few patients from Okinawa. The endpoint was overall survival (OS). Multivariable Cox regression analyses in the cohort of 433 patients revealed that all seven factors for calculating each PI were statistically significant prognostic predictors. Threeāyear OS rates for ATLāPI were 35.9% (lowārisk, n = 66), 10.4% (intermediateārisk, n = 256), and 1.6% (highārisk, n = 111), and those for JCOGāPI were 22.4% (moderateārisk, n = 176) and 5.3% (highārisk, n = 257). The JCOGāPI moderateārisk group included both the ATLāPI lowā and intermediateārisk groups. ATLāPI more clearly identified the lowārisk patient subgroup than JCOGāPI. To evaluate the external validity of the two PIs, we also assessed prognostic discriminability among 159 patients who loosely met the eligibility criteria of a previous clinical trial. Threeāyear OS rates for ATLāPI were 34.5% (lowārisk, n = 42), 9.2% (intermediateārisk, n = 109), and 12.5% (highārisk, n = 8). Those for JCOGāPI were 22.4% (moderateārisk, n = 95) and 7.6% (highārisk, n = 64). The lowārisk ATLāPI group had a better prognosis than the JCOGāPI moderateārisk group, suggesting that ATLāPI would be more useful than JCOGāPI for establishing and examining novel treatment strategies for ATL patients with a better prognosis. In addition, strongyloidiasis, previously suggested to be associated with ATLārelated deaths in Okinawa, was not a prognostic factor in this study