Preparation, spectral characterization, structural study, and evaluation of antibacterial activity of Schiff base complexes for VOII, CrIII, MnII, ZnII,CdII and CeIII

A new series of metal ions complexes of VO(II), Cr(III), Mn(II), Zn(II), Cd(II) and Ce(III) have been synthesized from the Schiff bases (4-chlorobenzylidene)-urea amine (L1) and (4-bromobenzylidene)-urea amine (L2). Structural features were obtained from their elemental microanalyses, magnetic susceptibility, molar conductance, FT-IR, UV–Vis, LC-Mass and 1HNMR spectral studies. The UV–Vis, magnetic susceptibility and molar conductance data of the complexes suggest a tetrahedral geometry around the central metal ion except, VOII complexes that has square pyramidal geometry, but CrIII and CeIII octahedral geometry. The biological activity for the ligand (L1) and its Vanadium and Cadmium complexes were studied. Structural geometries of compounds also were suggested in gas phase by using theoretical treatments, using Hyper Chem-6 program for the molecular mechanics and semi-empirical calculations. The heat of formation (?Hf ?) and binding energy (?Eb) in the temperature of 298K for the free ligand (L1) and their metal complexes were calculated by PM3 and ZINDO/I methods. The electrostatic potential of the free ligands were calculated to investigate the reactive sites of the molecules.Bacteriological evaluation of considerable number of these compounds were maintained using organisms Escherichia coli and Staphylococcus aureus,and they were found to exhibit the high effect of activity. This may be attributed to the impact of both the Schiff bases and the metal present in these complexes

The accuracy of currently used WHO´s Body Mass Index cut-off points to measure Overweight and Obesity in Syrian women: A correlation study

Purpose: Obesity is a common health problem in both developed and developing countries. BMI is commonly used to identify obesity. However, there is increasing evidence that the relationship between BMI and BF% differs among various ethnicities. The main objectives of this study are (1) to evaluate the correlation between BF% as determined by BIA, DEXA, Deuterium oxide (D2O) and BMI, (2) to assess the accuracy of currently used WHOÅLs BMI cut-off points to identify overweight and obesity among Syrian women. Material and Methods: A total of 908 healthy Syrian women aged 18-60 years participated in this study. Weight, height, BMI, BF% assessed by BIA and DEXA, and D2O have been determined. Results: BF% results obtained by BIA and DEXA, and D2O revealed strong correlations. BMI showed a statistically significant correlation with BF% determined by BIA, DEXA and D2O. Obesity when defined as BMI ≥ 30 and as BF% > 35% (derived from BIA, DEXA and D2O) classified 43%, 52.5%, 75.9% and 72.7% of women as obese, respectively. ROC analysis defined BMI cut-off points for overweight and obesity of 22.5 and 25.7, respectively. Using the new BMI cut-off point, the prevalence of obesity among Syrian women was increased by 24%. Conclusions: The current BMI cut-off points recommended by WHO underestimate the prevalence of overweight and obesity among Syrian women. Our data suggests that it is important to lower the proposed WHOÅLs BMI cut-off points for the Syrian women

A local human Vδ1 T cell population is associated with survival in nonsmall-cell lung cancer

Funding Information: D.B. has consulted for NanoString, reports honoraria from AstraZeneca and has a patent (PCT/GB2020/050221) issued on methods for cancer prognostication. J.R. and M.A.B. have consulted for Achilles Therapeutics. N.M. has stock options in and has consulted for Achilles Therapeutics. N.M. holds European patents relating to targeting neoantigens (PCT/EP2016/059401), identifying patient response to immune checkpoint blockade (PCT/EP2016/071471), determining HLA loss of heterozygosity (PCT/GB2018/052004) and predicting survival rates of patients with cancer (PCT/GB2020/050221). A.H. attended one advisory board for Abbvie, Roche and GRAIL, and reports personal fees from Abbvie, Boehringer Ingelheim, Takeda, AstraZeneca, Daiichi Sankyo, Merck Serono, Merck/MSD, UCB and Roche for delivering general education/training in clinical trials. A.H. owned shares in Illumina and Thermo Fisher Scientific (sold in 2020) and receives fees for membership of Independent Data Monitoring Committees for Roche-sponsored clinical trials. S.A.Q. is co-founder and Chief Scientific Officer of Achilles Therapeutics. A.C.H. is a board member and equity holder in ImmunoQure, AG and Gamma Delta Therapeutics, and is an equity holder in Adaptate Biotherapeutics and chair of the scientific advisory board. C.S. acknowledges grant support from Pfizer, AstraZeneca, Bristol Myers Squibb, Roche-Ventana, Boehringer Ingelheim, Archer Dx Inc (collaboration in minimal residual disease-sequencing technologies) and Ono Pharmaceuticals, is an AstraZeneca Advisory Board member and Chief Investigator for the MeRmaiD1 clinical trial. C.S has consulted for Amgen, AstraZeneca, Bicycle Therapeutics, Bristol Myers Squibb, Celgene, Genentech, GlaxoSmithKline, GRAIL, Illumina, Medixci, Metabomed, MSD, Novartis, Pfizer, Roche-Ventana and Sarah Cannon Research Institute. C.S. has stock options in Apogen Biotechnologies, Epic Biosciences and GRAIL, and has stock options and is co-founder of Achilles Therapeutics. C.S. holds patents relating: to assay technology to detect tumor recurrence (PCT/GB2017/053289); to targeting neoantigens (PCT/EP2016/059401), identifying patent response to immune checkpoint blockade (PCT/EP2016/071471), determining HLA loss of heterozygosity (PCT/GB2018/052004), predicting survival rates of patients with cancer (PCT/GB2020/050221); to treating cancer by targeting Insertion/deletion (indel) mutations (PCT/GB2018/051893); to identifying indel mutation targets (PCT/GB2018/051892); to methods for lung cancer detection (PCT/US2017/028013); and to identifying responders to cancer treatment (PCT/GB2018/051912). The remaining authors declare no competing interests. Funding Information: We thank the Oxford Genomics Centre at the Wellcome Centre for Human Genetics (funded by Wellcome Trust grant no. 203141/Z/16/Z) for the generation and initial processing of the RNA-seq data from sorted TILs. We thank S. Bola for technical support and S. Vanloo for administrative support. The GTEx project was supported by the Common Fund of the Office of the Director of the National Institutes of Health, and by the NCI, NHGRI, NHLBI, NIDA, NIMH and NINDS. Y.W. was supported by a Wellcome Trust Clinical Research Career Development Fellowship (no. 220589/Z/20/Z), an Academy of Medical Sciences Starter Grant for Clinical Lecturers, a National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Academic Clinical Lectureship and the NIHR University College London Hospitals Biomedical Research Centre. D.B. was supported by funding from the NIHR University College London Hospitals Biomedical Research Centre, the ideas 2 innovation translation scheme at the Francis Crick Institute, the Breast Cancer Research Foundation (BCRF) and a Cancer Research UK (CRUK) Early Detection and Diagnosis Project award. M.J.H. is a CRUK Fellow and has received funding from CRUK, NIHR, Rosetrees Trust, UKI NETs and the NIHR University College London Hospitals Biomedical Research Centre. C.S. is Royal Society Napier Research Professor. This work was supported by the Francis Crick Institute which receives its core funding from CRUK (no. FC001169), the UK Medical Research Council (no. FC001169) and the Wellcome Trust (no. FC001169). This research was funded in whole, or in part, by the Wellcome Trust (no. FC001169). For the purpose of Open Access, the author has applied a CC BY public copyright license to any Author Accepted Manuscript version arising from this submission. C.S. is funded by CRUK (TRACERx, PEACE and CRUK Cancer Immunotherapy Catalyst Network), CRUK Lung Cancer Centre of Excellence (no. C11496/A30025), the Rosetrees Trust, Butterfield and Stoneygate Trusts, NovoNordisk Foundation (ID16584), Royal Society Professorship Enhancement Award (no. RP/EA/180007), the NIHR Biomedical Research Centre at University College London Hospitals, the CRUK–University College London Centre, Experimental Cancer Medicine Centre and the BCRF. This work was supported by a Stand Up To Cancer‐LUNGevity-American Lung Association Lung Cancer Interception Dream Team Translational Research Grant (grant no. SU2C-AACR-DT23-17 to S. M. Dubinett and A. E. Spira). Stand Up To Cancer is a division of the Entertainment Industry Foundation. Research grants are administered by the American Association for Cancer Research, the Scientific Partner of SU2C. C.S. receives funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (no. FP7/2007-2013) Consolidator Grant (no. FP7-THESEUS-617844), European Commission ITN (no. FP7-PloidyNet 607722), an ERC Advanced Grant (PROTEUS) from the ERC under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (grant no. 835297), and Chromavision from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (grant no. 665233). Publisher Copyright: © 2022, The Author(s).Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Genomic–transcriptomic evolution in lung cancer and metastasis

Intratumour heterogeneity (ITH) fuels lung cancer evolution, which leads to immune evasion and resistance to therapy. Here, using paired whole-exome and RNA sequencing data, we investigate intratumour transcriptomic diversity in 354 non-small cell lung cancer tumours from 347 out of the first 421 patients prospectively recruited into the TRACERx study. Analyses of 947 tumour regions, representing both primary and metastatic disease, alongside 96 tumour-adjacent normal tissue samples implicate the transcriptome as a major source of phenotypic variation. Gene expression levels and ITH relate to patterns of positive and negative selection during tumour evolution. We observe frequent copy number-independent allele-specific expression that is linked to epigenomic dysfunction. Allele-specific expression can also result in genomic–transcriptomic parallel evolution, which converges on cancer gene disruption. We extract signatures of RNA single-base substitutions and link their aetiology to the activity of the RNA-editing enzymes ADAR and APOBEC3A, thereby revealing otherwise undetected ongoing APOBEC activity in tumours. Characterizing the transcriptomes of primary–metastatic tumour pairs, we combine multiple machine-learning approaches that leverage genomic and transcriptomic variables to link metastasis-seeding potential to the evolutionary context of mutations and increased proliferation within primary tumour regions. These results highlight the interplay between the genome and transcriptome in influencing ITH, lung cancer evolution and metastasis

The evolution of lung cancer and impact of subclonal selection in TRACERx

Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer-associated mortality worldwide. Here we analysed 1,644 tumour regions sampled at surgery or during follow-up from the first 421 patients with non-small cell lung cancer prospectively enrolled into the TRACERx study. This project aims to decipher lung cancer evolution and address the primary study endpoint: determining the relationship between intratumour heterogeneity and clinical outcome. In lung adenocarcinoma, mutations in 22 out of 40 common cancer genes were under significant subclonal selection, including classical tumour initiators such as TP53 and KRAS. We defined evolutionary dependencies between drivers, mutational processes and whole genome doubling (WGD) events. Despite patients having a history of smoking, 8% of lung adenocarcinomas lacked evidence of tobacco-induced mutagenesis. These tumours also had similar detection rates for EGFR mutations and for RET, ROS1, ALK and MET oncogenic isoforms compared with tumours in never-smokers, which suggests that they have a similar aetiology and pathogenesis. Large subclonal expansions were associated with positive subclonal selection. Patients with tumours harbouring recent subclonal expansions, on the terminus of a phylogenetic branch, had significantly shorter disease-free survival. Subclonal WGD was detected in 19% of tumours, and 10% of tumours harboured multiple subclonal WGDs in parallel. Subclonal, but not truncal, WGD was associated with shorter disease-free survival. Copy number heterogeneity was associated with extrathoracic relapse within 1 year after surgery. These data demonstrate the importance of clonal expansion, WGD and copy number instability in determining the timing and patterns of relapse in non-small cell lung cancer and provide a comprehensive clinical cancer evolutionary data resource

The evolution of non-small cell lung cancer metastases in TRACERx

Metastatic disease is responsible for the majority of cancer-related deaths. We report the longitudinal evolutionary analysis of 126 non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) tumours from 421 prospectively recruited patients in TRACERx who developed metastatic disease, compared with a control cohort of 144 non-metastatic tumours. In 25% of cases, metastases diverged early, before the last clonal sweep in the primary tumour, and early divergence was enriched for patients who were smokers at the time of initial diagnosis. Simulations suggested that early metastatic divergence more frequently occurred at smaller tumour diameters (less than 8 mm). Single-region primary tumour sampling resulted in 83% of late divergence cases being misclassified as early, highlighting the importance of extensive primary tumour sampling. Polyclonal dissemination, which was associated with extrathoracic disease recurrence, was found in 32% of cases. Primary lymph node disease contributed to metastatic relapse in less than 20% of cases, representing a hallmark of metastatic potential rather than a route to subsequent recurrences/disease progression. Metastasis-seeding subclones exhibited subclonal expansions within primary tumours, probably reflecting positive selection. Our findings highlight the importance of selection in metastatic clone evolution within untreated primary tumours, the distinction between monoclonal versus polyclonal seeding in dictating site of recurrence, the limitations of current radiological screening approaches for early diverging tumours and the need to develop strategies to target metastasis-seeding subclones before relapse

Antibodies against endogenous retroviruses promote lung cancer immunotherapy

B cells are frequently found in the margins of solid tumours as organized follicles in ectopic lymphoid organs called tertiary lymphoid structures (TLS). Although TLS have been found to correlate with improved patient survival and response to immune checkpoint blockade (ICB), the underlying mechanisms of this association remain elusive. Here we investigate lung-resident B cell responses in patients from the TRACERx 421 (Tracking Non-Small-Cell Lung Cancer Evolution Through Therapy) and other lung cancer cohorts, and in a recently established immunogenic mouse model for lung adenocarcinoma. We find that both human and mouse lung adenocarcinomas elicit local germinal centre responses and tumour-binding antibodies, and further identify endogenous retrovirus (ERV) envelope glycoproteins as a dominant anti-tumour antibody target. ERV-targeting B cell responses are amplified by ICB in both humans and mice, and by targeted inhibition of KRAS(G12C) in the mouse model. ERV-reactive antibodies exert anti-tumour activity that extends survival in the mouse model, and ERV expression predicts the outcome of ICB in human lung adenocarcinoma. Finally, we find that effective immunotherapy in the mouse model requires CXCL13-dependent TLS formation. Conversely, therapeutic CXCL13 treatment potentiates anti-tumour immunity and synergizes with ICB. Our findings provide a possible mechanistic basis for the association of TLS with immunotherapy response

Porous biodegradable metals for hard tissue scaffolds: a review

Scaffolds have been utilized in tissue regeneration to facilitate the formation and maturation of new tissues or organs where a balance between temporary mechanical support and mass transport (degradation and cell growth) is ideally achieved. Polymers have been widely chosen as tissue scaffolding material having a good combination of biodegradability, biocompatibility, and porous structure. Metals that can degrade in physiological environment, namely, biodegradable metals, are proposed as potential materials for hard tissue scaffolding where biodegradable polymers are often considered as having poor mechanical properties. Biodegradable metal scaffolds have showed interesting mechanical property that was close to that of human bone with tailored degradation behaviour. The current promising fabrication technique for making scaffolds, such as computation-aided solid free-form method, can be easily applied to metals. With further optimization in topologically ordered porosity design exploiting material property and fabrication technique, porous biodegradable metals could be the potential materials for making hard tissue scaffolds

X-ray crystallographic, spectroscopic, and electrochemical properties of Group 12 metal-chlorides of di-2-pyridyl ketone acetic acid hydrazone (dpkaah)

<p>Di-2-pyridyl ketone acetic acid hydrazone hydrate, dpkaah.0.5H₂O (<b>1</b>), prepared from the acid catalyzed condensation of di-2-pyridyl ketone (dpk) with acetic acid hydrazide in refluxing ethanol, undergoes facile coordination to Group 12 metal-chlorides in CH₃CN to form [MCl₂(κ³-N,N,O-dpkaah)] {M=Zn (<b>3</b>), Cd (<b>4</b>) or Hg(<b>5</b>)}. X-ray structural analysis on single crystals of dpkaah (<b>2</b>) and <b>3</b>–<b>5</b> confirmed their identities and revealed pseudo-coordination of the carbonyl group (C=O). Infrared measurements confirmed the pseudo-coordination of the carbonyl group to MCl₂. The geometries of <b>3</b>–<b>5</b> vary, while <b>5</b> adopts a square pyramidal geometry, <b>4</b> has a structure halfway between square pyramidal and trigonal bipyramidal and <b>3</b> is less distorted from square pyramidal than <b>3</b>. The extended structures of <b>3</b>–<b>5</b> exposed extensive networks of non-covalent interactions, and in the case of <b>4</b> chloride bridges of the type Cd(μ-Cl)₂Cd were observed. Spectroscopic measurements in different solvents and variable temperature studies confirmed the stability of the keto form of <b>1</b> and <b>3</b>–<b>5</b>. Spectrophotometric titrations of protophilic solutions (dmf or dmso) of <b>1</b> with MCl₂ revealed facile coordination of MCl₂ to <b>1</b> and disclosed low concentrations of MCl₂ can be detected and determined using protophilic solutions of <b>1</b>. Electrochemical measurements on dmf solutions divulged electrochemical decomposition of uncoordinated <b>1</b>, the facile coordination of <b>1</b> to MCl₂, and the stability of <b>3</b>–<b>5</b> decreases as the size of the metal ion increases.</p