Religious Leaders and Elections in the Polarizing Context of Indonesia

Studies of elections in young democracies point to the risk of elections intensifying existing social conflicts, a process observed in Indonesia in recent years. The 2017 mayoral election in Yogyakarta contradicts this trend, presenting an empirical puzzle. Despite the fact that local conditions might encourage electoral mobilization along sectarian lines, we find evidence of restraint. Based on analysis of the contents of sermons in 12 mosques and churches in the month before the election we identify three factors that discourage religious leaders from exercising opportunities to intensify religious tension. These include (a) elites were not motivated to exacerbate communal tension because they do not feel the election will bring about reform or change that would seriously affect their established position, (b) even though sectarian messaging is possible, the elites did not believe masses could be easily persuaded by sectarian political messaging, and (c) political outbidding by using sectarian messages would risk confronting the local dominant culture of harmony. These findings suggest that several factors need to be activated for religious leaders to exercise their moral authority over worshippers for political purposes. The presence of an opportunity structure for intensifying sectarian conflict is not sufficient for that conflict to emerge. 

Immune Checkpoint Blockade: Subjugation of the Masses

Osteosarcoma remains the most common form of bone cancer in adolescents. Standard of care treatment for osteosarcoma includes chemotherapy combined with limb-salvage surgery or amputation. Survival rates for compliant patients are 60–80% for those with localized tumors and 15–30% if the tumor metastasizes or reoccurs. Given the successes of monoclonal antibody blockades in other cancers, clinical trials for applying immunotherapies to osteosarcoma are underway. Antibody blockades reinvigorate T cells to eliminate cancer cells thereby leading to decreased tumor burden and long-term regression. Single monoclonal antibody therapy has shown modest efficacy compared to standard of care. However, treating with only a single antibody can ultimately result in immune evasion by heterogeneous tumors via selection of cells expressing other inhibitory ligands. Hence, combination immunotherapies have yielded the most promising results for eliminating tumors or preventing reoccurrence in other cancer types and will likely be the most efficacious strategy for treating osteosarcoma. Here, we review current immunotherapies for other cancers and their potential application to osteosarcoma

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.Peer reviewe

Using The Experience Sampling Method in The Context of Contingency Management for Substance Abuse Treatment

Contingency management (CM) treatments have been shown to be effective in reducing substance use. This manuscript illustrates how the experience sampling method (ESM) can depict behavior and behavior change and can be used to explore CM treatment mechanisms. ESM characterizes idiosyncratic patterns of behavior and offers the potential to determine how behavioral patterns are affected by the operant conditioning principles that drive CM. It may also lead to the identification of new target behaviors for CM in the context of substance abuse treatment

Radiation-induced neoantigens broaden the immunotherapeutic window of cancers with low mutational loads

Immunotherapies are a promising advance in cancer treatment. However, because only a subset of cancer patients benefits from these treatments it is important to find mechanisms that will broaden the responding patient population. Generally, tumors with high mutational burdens have the potential to express greater numbers of mutant neoantigens. As neoantigens can be targets of protective adaptive immunity, highly mutated tumors are more responsive to immunotherapy. Given that external beam radiation 1) is a standard-of-care cancer therapy, 2) induces expression of mutant proteins and potentially mutant neoantigens in treated cells, and 3) has been shown to synergize clinically with immune checkpoint therapy (ICT), we hypothesized that at least one mechanism of this synergy was the generation of de novo mutant neoantigen targets in irradiated cells. Herein, we use KrasG12D x p53−/− sarcoma cell lines (KP sarcomas) that we and others have shown to be nearly devoid of mutations, are poorly antigenic, are not controlled by ICT, and do not induce a protective antitumor memory response. However, following one in vitro dose of 4- or 9-Gy irradiation, KP sarcoma cells acquire mutational neoantigens and become sensitive to ICT in vivo in a T cell-dependent manner. We further demonstrate that some of the radiation-induced mutations generate cytotoxic CD8+ T cell responses, are protective in a vaccine model, and are sufficient to make the parental KP sarcoma line susceptible to ICT. These results provide a proof of concept that induction of new antigenic targets in irradiated tumor cells represents an additional mechanism explaining the clinical findings of the synergy between radiation and immunotherapy.</jats:p

Supplemental Material - Determining barriers to submitting antimicrobial-resistant isolates among hospitals in Texas Public Health Region 8

Supplemental Material for Determining barriers to submitting antimicrobial-resistant isolates among hospitals in Texas Public Health Region 8 by Bailie Moorhead, Niva Shrestha, Alvin Boyd Newman-Caro, Sydney L. Vangeli, Victoria N. Lussier, Mark I. Grijalva, Margaret E. Jonas, Danielle Natividad Jackson, Tianna M. Mack, Zackary L. Herrle, Marcheta Hill1, Gretchen Rodriguez2, Rachael Singer2, Cynthia Williams2, Adaugo Nwanguma2, Enyinnaya N. Merengwa2, Rachel Pittman, and Rebecca L. Sanchez in Journal of Infection Prevention.</p