Natural killer cell response to chemotherapy-stressed cancer cells: Role in tumor immunosurveillance.

Natural killer (NK) cells are innate cytotoxic lymphoid cells that actively prevent neoplastic development, growth, and metastatic dissemination in a process called cancer immunosurveillance. An equilibrium between immune control and tumor growth is maintained as long as cancer cells evade immunosurveillance. Therapies designed to kill cancer cells and to simultaneously sustain host antitumor immunity are an appealing strategy to control tumor growth. Several chemotherapeutic agents, depending on which drugs and doses are used, give rise to DNA damage and cancer cell death by means of apoptosis, immunogenic cell death, or other forms of non-apoptotic death (i.e., mitotic catastrophe, senescence, and autophagy). However, it is becoming increasingly clear that they can trigger additional stress responses. Indeed, relevant immunostimulating effects of different therapeutic programs include also the activation of pathways able to promote their recognition by immune effector cells. Among stress-inducible immunostimulating proteins, changes in the expression levels of NK cell-activating and inhibitory ligands, as well as of death receptors on tumor cells, play a critical role in their detection and elimination by innate immune effectors, including NK cells. Here, we will review recent advances in chemotherapy-mediated cellular stress pathways able to stimulate NK cell effector functions. In particular, we will address how these cytotoxic lymphocytes sense and respond to different types of drug-induced stresses contributing to anticancer activity

Unexpected Variation of the Codeine/Morphine Ratio Following Fatal Heroin Overdose

Postmortem samples from 14 cases of suspected heroin overdose were subjected to a preliminary systematic toxicological analysis in order to highlight the presence of unknown exogenous compounds (e.g., drugs of abuse, alcohol) that may have played a role in the mechanism of death. This analysis unveiled histories of poly-drug use in seven of the cases under investigation. Moreover, the concentrations of morphine and codeine in the brain were also investigated, and the results were compared with the data obtained from the blood specimens. The concentration of morphine in blood ranged from 33 to 688 ng/mL, while the concentration of codeine ranged from 0 to 193 ng/mL. However, in the brain, the concentration of morphine was found to be between 85 and 396 ng/g, while the levels of codeine ranged from 11 to 160 ng/g. The codeine/morphine ratio in the blood ranged from 0.043 to 0.619; however, in the brain, the same ratio was found to be between 0.129 and 0.552. In most cases, a significantly higher codeine/morphine ratio was found in the brain, suggesting the accumulation of codeine in brain tissue due its high lipophilicity as compared with morphine

Extensión universitaria y formación docente : La alfabetización como práctica social y escolar

En el año 2012 el Consejo Federal de Educación (CFE) comunicó, a través de la Resolución 174/12, las “Pautas federales para el mejoramiento de la enseñanza y el aprendizaje y las trayectorias escolares en el nivel inicial, primario y modalidades, y su regulación”. En ellas se expresa la necesidad de diseñar diversas formas de escolarización, que permitan que todos aquellos que se inscriben en el nivel puedan concluirlo en las mejores condiciones posibles: disminuyendo la permanencia, aumentando los indicadores de calidad en el aprendizaje, tendiendo a la eliminación de la repitencia en el primer ciclo y logrando la alfabetización en el segundo grado. Al mismo tiempo, en diversas ocasiones las autoridades educativas de diversos distritos de la provincia de Buenos Aires han planteado como demanda a la Universidad Pedagógica (UNIPE) instancias de formación y reflexión para directores de escuelas e inspectores.Facultad de Humanidades y Ciencias de la Educació

Tratamiento de úlceras venosas de piernas : revisión bibliográfica

Fil: Vidal, Jorgelina Natalí. Hospital Luis Lagomaggiore (Mendoza, Argentina). Servicio de DermatologíaFil: Cippitelli, María José. Hospital Luis Lagomaggiore (Mendoza, Argentina). Servicio de Dermatologí

NKG2D and its ligands: one for all, all for one

The activating receptor NKG2D is peculiar in its capability to bind to numerous and highly diversified MHC class I-like self-molecules. These ligands are poorly expressed on normal cells but can be induced on damaged, transformed or infected cells, with the final NKG2D ligand expression resulting from multiple levels of regulation. Although redundant molecular mechanisms can converge in the regulation of all NKG2D ligands, different stimuli can induce specific cellular responses, leading to the expression of one or few ligands. A large body of evidence demonstrates that NK cell activation can be triggered by different NKG2D ligands, often expressed on the same cell, suggesting a functional redundancy of these molecules. However, since a number of evasion mechanisms can reduce membrane expression of these molecules both on virus-infected and tumor cells, the co-expression of different ligands and/or the presence of allelic forms of the same ligand guarantee NKG2D activation in various stressful conditions and cell contexts. Noteworthy, NKG2D ligands can differ in their ability to down-modulate NKG2D membrane expression in human NK cells supporting the idea that NKG2D transduces different signals upon binding various ligands. Moreover, whether proteolytically shed and exosome-associated soluble NKG2D ligands share with their membrane-bound counterparts the same ability to induce NKG2D-mediated signaling is still a matter of debate. Here, we will review recent studies on the NKG2D/NKG2D ligand biology to summarize and discuss the redundancy and/or diversity in ligand expression, regulation, and receptor specificity

Human Action Recognition with RGB-D Sensors

Human action recognition, also known as HAR, is at the foundation of many different applications related to behavioral analysis, surveillance, and safety, thus it has been a very active research area in the last years. The release of inexpensive RGB-D sensors fostered researchers working in this field because depth data simplify the processing of visual data that could be otherwise difficult using classic RGB devices. Furthermore, the availability of depth data allows to implement solutions that are unobtrusive and privacy preserving with respect to classic video-based analysis. In this scenario, the aim of this chapter is to review the most salient techniques for HAR based on depth signal processing, providing some details on a specific method based on temporal pyramid of key poses, evaluated on the well-known MSR Action3D dataset

Re-escribiendo la historia del modernismo en África

In this article, the author intends to make visible the clear intention of a generation of African cultural producers committed to model the modern his-tory of their countries and to rewrite the History of Artistic Modernism in Africa, from a non-Eurocen-tric perspective.An intention that is characterized by the appropriation of the heterogeneous expe-rience of the processes of decolonization.For this purpose, two major exhibition and academic proj-ects are analyzed: Khartoum School: The Making of Modern Art Movement in Sudan (from 1945 topresent),co-curated by Hoor Al-Qasimi and Salah M. Hassan, and When Arts Become Liberty: The Egyptian Surrealists (1938-1965),curated by Hoor Al-Qasimi and Salah Has-san.En este artículo la autora se propone hacer visible la clara intención de una generación de productores culturales africanos empeñados en modelar la historia moderna de sus países y de reescribir la Historia del Modernismo artístico en África, desde una perspectiva no eurocéntrica; intención que se caracteriza por la apropiación de la heterogénea experiencia de los procesos de descolonización.Para tal fin, se realiza el análisis de dos importantes proyectos expositivos y académicos: Khartoum School: The Making of Modern Art Movement in Sudan (desde 1945 hasta el presente) co-curada por Hoor Al-Qasimi y Salah M. Hassan y When Arts Become Liberty: The Egyptian Surrealists (1938- 1965) comisariada por Hoor Al-Qasimi y Salah Has-san

Evaluation of a skeleton-based method for human activity recognition on a large-scale RGB-D dataset

Paper accepted for presentation at 2nd IET International Conference on Technologies for Active and Assisted Living (TechAAL), 24-25 October 2016, IET London: Savoy Place.Low cost RGB-D sensors have been used extensively in the field of Human Action Recognition. The availability of skeleton joints simplifies the process of feature extraction from depth or RGB frames, and this feature fostered the development of activity recognition algorithms using skeletons as input data. This work evaluates the performance of a skeleton-based algorithm for Human Action Recognition on a large-scale dataset. The algorithm exploits the bag of key poses method, where a sequence of skeleton features is represented as a set of key poses. A temporal pyramid is adopted to model the temporal structure of the key poses, represented using histograms. Finally, a multi-class SVM performs the classification task, obtaining promising results on the large-scale NTU RGB+D dataset.The authors would like to acknowledge the contribution of the COST Action IC1303 AAPELE (Architectures, Algorithms and Platforms for Enhanced Living Environments)