A New Insight into Hepatitis C Vaccine Development

Chronic hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection remains a serious burden to public health worldwide. Currently, HCV-infected patients could undergo antiviral therapy by giving pegylated IFN-α with ribavirin. However, this therapy is only effective in around 50% of patients with HCV genotype 1, which accounts for more than 70% of all HCV infection, and it is not well tolerated for most patients. Moreover, there is no vaccine available. The efforts on identifying protective immunity against HCV have progressed recently. Neutralizing antibodies and robust T cell responses including both CD4+ and CD8+ have been shown to be related to the clearance of HCV, which have shed lights on the potential success of HCV vaccines. There are many vaccines developed and tested before entering clinical trials. Here, we would first discuss strategies of viral immune evasion and correlates of protective host immunity and finally review some prospective vaccine approaches against chronic HCV infection

Homogenization of Bell inequalities

A technique, which we call homogenization, is applied to transform CH-type Bell inequalities, which contain lower order correlations, into CHSH-type Bell inequalities, which are defined for highest order correlation functions. A homogenization leads to inequalities involving more settings, that is a choice of one more observable is possible for each party. We show that this technique preserves the tightness of Bell inequalities: a homogenization of a tight CH-type Bell inequality is still a tight CHSH-type Bell inequality. As an example we obtain $3\times3\times3$ CHSH-type Bell inequalities by homogenization of $2\times 2\times 2$ CH-type Bell inequalities derived by Sliwa in [Phys. Lett. A {\bf 317}, 165 (2003)]

Mining association language patterns using a distributional semantic model for negative life event classification

AbstractPurposeNegative life events, such as the death of a family member, an argument with a spouse or the loss of a job, play an important role in triggering depressive episodes. Therefore, it is worthwhile to develop psychiatric services that can automatically identify such events. This study describes the use of association language patterns, i.e., meaningful combinations of words (e.g., <loss, job>), as features to classify sentences with negative life events into predefined categories (e.g., Family, Love, Work).MethodsThis study proposes a framework that combines a supervised data mining algorithm and an unsupervised distributional semantic model to discover association language patterns. The data mining algorithm, called association rule mining, was used to generate a set of seed patterns by incrementally associating frequently co-occurring words from a small corpus of sentences labeled with negative life events. The distributional semantic model was then used to discover more patterns similar to the seed patterns from a large, unlabeled web corpus.ResultsThe experimental results showed that association language patterns were significant features for negative life event classification. Additionally, the unsupervised distributional semantic model was not only able to improve the level of performance but also to reduce the reliance of the classification process on the availability of a large, labeled corpus

Novel Mutation in Boy With Cartilage-hair Hypoplasia

BackgroundCartilage-hair hypoplasia (MIM 250250) is an autosomal recessive disease with diverse clinical manifestations. The clinical phenotypes include variable degrees of bone and hair dysplasia, deficient cellular and/or humoral immunity, and a predisposition to malignancy.MethodsWe performed genetic studies of a patient with disproportionate short stature and brittle scalp hair. Genetic studies were also carried out in the patient's parents.ResultsA novel maternal mutation that consisted of a duplication of 14 nucleotides at position −13 of the RNA component of the RNA component of mitochondrial RNA processing endoribonuclease gene (RMRP; g. −26 to −13 dupTACTACTCTGTGAA, promoter region) and a paternal mutation base substitution of C to T at nucleotide + 230 (designated as + 1 in the transcription initiation site) in the coding sequence of RMRP were detected in this patient.ConclusionA novel maternal RMRP mutation was found in a Chinese boy with typical cartilage-hair hypoplasia

CHSH type Bell inequalities involving a party with two or three local binary settings

We construct a simple algorithm to generate any CHSH type Bell inequality involving a party with two local binary measurements from two CHSH type inequalities without this party. The algorithm readily generalizes to situations, where the additional observer uses three measurement settings. There, each inequality involving the additional party is constructed from three inequalities with this party excluded. With this generalization at hand, we construct and analyze new symmetric inequalities for four observers and three experimental settings per observer.Comment: 8 pages, no figur