Early and extensive CD55 loss from red blood cells supports a causal role in malarial anaemia

BACKGROUND\ud \ud Levels of complement regulatory proteins (CrP) on the surface of red blood cells (RBC) decrease during severe malarial anaemia and as part of cell ageing process. It remains unclear whether CrP changes seen during malaria contribute to the development of anaemia, or result from an altered RBC age distribution due to suppressive effects of malaria on erythropoiesis.\ud \ud METHODS\ud \ud A cross sectional study was conducted in the north-east coast of Tanzania to investigate whether the changes in glycosylphosphatidylinositol (GPI)-anchored complement regulatory proteins (CD55 and CD59) contributes to malaria anaemia. Blood samples were collected from a cohort of children under intensive surveillance for Plasmodium falciparum parasitaemia and illness. Levels of CD55 and CD59 were measured by flow cytometer and compared between anaemic (8.08 g/dl) and non- anaemic children (11.42 g/dl).\ud \ud RESULTS\ud \ud Levels of CD55 and CD59 decreased with increased RBC age. CD55 levels were lower in anaemic children and the difference was seen in RBC of all ages. Levels of CD59 were lower in anaemic children, but these differences were not significant. CD55, but not CD59, levels correlated positively with the level of haemoglobin in anaemic children.\ud \ud CONCLUSION\ud \ud The extent of CD55 loss from RBC of all ages early in the course of malarial anaemia and the correlation of CD55 with haemoglobin levels support the hypothesis that CD55 may play a causal role in this disorder

A framework for integrated environmental health impact assessment of systemic risks

Traditional methods of risk assessment have provided good service in support of policy, mainly in relation to standard setting and regulation of hazardous chemicals or practices. In recent years, however, it has become apparent that many of the risks facing society are systemic in nature – complex risks, set within wider social, economic and environmental contexts. Reflecting this, policy-making too has become more wide-ranging in scope, more collaborative and more precautionary in approach. In order to inform such policies, more integrated methods of assessment are needed. Based on work undertaken in two large EU-funded projects (INTARESE and HEIMTSA), this paper reviews the range of approaches to assessment now in used, proposes a framework for integrated environmental health impact assessment (both as a basis for bringing together and choosing between different methods of assessment, and extending these to more complex problems), and discusses some of the challenges involved in conducting integrated assessments to support policy

Significance of vascular endothelial growth factor in growth and peritoneal dissemination of ovarian cancer

Vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) is a key regulator of angiogenesis which drives endothelial cell survival, proliferation, and migration while increasing vascular permeability. Playing an important role in the physiology of normal ovaries, VEGF has also been implicated in the pathogenesis of ovarian cancer. Essentially by promoting tumor angiogenesis and enhancing vascular permeability, VEGF contributes to the development of peritoneal carcinomatosis associated with malignant ascites formation, the characteristic feature of advanced ovarian cancer at diagnosis. In both experimental and clinical studies, VEGF levels have been inversely correlated with survival. Moreover, VEGF inhibition has been shown to inhibit tumor growth and ascites production and to suppress tumor invasion and metastasis. These findings have laid the basis for the clinical evaluation of agents targeting VEGF signaling pathway in patients with ovarian cancer. In this review, we will focus on VEGF involvement in the pathophysiology of ovarian cancer and its contribution to the disease progression and dissemination

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency–Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research

Socio-technical scales in socio-environmental modeling: Managing a system-of-systems modeling approach.

System-of-systems approaches for integrated assessments have become prevalent in recent years. Such approaches integrate a variety of models from different disciplines and modeling paradigms to represent a socio-environmental (or social-ecological) system aiming to holistically inform policy and decision-making processes. Central to the system-of-systems approaches is the representation of systems in a multi-tier framework with nested scales. Current modeling paradigms, however, have disciplinary-specific lineage, leading to inconsistencies in the conceptualization and integration of socio-environmental systems. In this paper, a multidisciplinary team of researchers, from engineering, natural and social sciences, have come together to detail socio-technical practices and challenges that arise in the consideration of scale throughout the socio-environmental modeling process. We identify key paths forward, focused on explicit consideration of scale and uncertainty, strengthening interdisciplinary communication, and improvement of the documentation process. We call for a grand vision (and commensurate funding) for holistic system-of-systems research that engages researchers, stakeholders, and policy makers in a multi-tiered process for the co-creation of knowledge and solutions to major socio-environmental problems