Humoral immune response to MUC5AC in patients with colorectal polyps and colorectal carcinoma

BACKGROUND: MUC5AC is a secreted mucin aberrantly expressed by colorectal polyps and carcinoma. It has been hypothesized that aberrant expression of MUC5AC in colorectal carcinoma tissues increased the overall survival of patients with colorectal carcinoma. The present study investigates the incidence of naturally occurring MUC5AC antibodies in the sera of normal individuals, patients with colonic polyps and patients with advanced colorectal carcinoma. A second aim was to determine the relationship of MUC5AC antibody with the prognosis of colorectal carcinoma. METHODS: Free circulating MUC5AC antibodies were measured using an enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay with a synthetic peptide corresponding to an 8 aa. segment of MUC5AC tandem repeat region. Immunohistochemical analysis was completed to demonstrate MUC5AC expression in the polyp specimens. RESULTS: MUC5AC antibodies were detected in 6 of 22 (27.3%) healthy subjects, 9 of 20 (45%) polyp patients, 18 of 30 (60%) patients with colorectal cancer. The presence of circulating free MUC5AC antibody levels was significantly correlated with expression of MUC5AC in polyp sections. Serum MUC5AC antibody positivity was higher in patients with colon located tumors, advanced stage and poorly differentiated tumors were found negatively affecting patient survival in our study. MUC5AC antibody positivity was higher in patients with poor prognostic parameters. Disease free survival and overall survival were shorter in this group of patients. In the multivariate analysis MUC5AC antibody positivity didn't find an independent prognostic factor on prognosis. CONCLUSION: Decreased survival in colorectal carcinoma patients with MUC5AC antibody positivity may be due to a decrease in the MUC5AC expression in tumor tissues of surviving carcinoma patients

Who wants their city to become a world city? Comment on “Expanding the international trade and investment policy agenda: The role of cities and services”

In proposing a role of economic diplomacy on behalf of cities, Cote, Estrin and Shapiro (2020) take it as read that promoting a city in the ranks of world cities, of key centers of corporate headquarters, business services, and new technology, is a good thing for that city. A city, however, is made up of heterogeneous actors, and in any particular city that grows in this way many of those actors will become worse off. Moreover, if we consider the problem from the standpoint of a national economic system, or of the global system as a whole, the growth of world cities may be due not so much to the conduct of mutually beneficial trade as to the appropriation of monopoly rents. Business policy researchers should identify the stakes for the likely winners and losers, and also take market structure issues into account. Policies based simply on promoting a city’s growth and international standing make inequality within and between a country’s cities worse, and implicitly embrace the growth of market power as a worthy objective

The corrosion of occupational pensions solidarity in the Netherlands

By embedding pre-funded occupational pensions into the status order of a neo-corporatist system of industrial relations, the Netherlands has developed a second pillar that is second to none in terms of size, inclusiveness and solidarity. But this has also led to a universal financialisation of retirement provision, making the income of the elderly population contingent on the vagaries of financial markets. Two financial crises within less than a decade ended the illusion that such generosity can come at a low price, and thus be reconciled with competitive labour costs. The Dutch government initiated a series of reforms that gave employers a partial exit from shouldering the risks of retirement, reduced generosity and recently also started to undermine the extent of solidaristic redistribution. Hence, occupational pensions are gradually being disembedded from the status order crucial for their comparative good performance in the past with regard to reconciling social and financial sustainability

Unbundling Freedom in the Sharing Economy

Courts and scholars point to the sharing economy as the most recent proof that our labor amp employment infrastructure is obsolete because it rests on a narrow and outmoded idea ”namely that only workers subjected to direct personalized control by their employers need workrelated protections and benefits Since they diagnose the problem as being our system\u27s emphasis on control these critics have long called for reducing or eliminating the primacy of the control test in classifying workers as either protected employees or unprotected independent contractors Despite these persistent criticisms however the concept of control has been remarkably sticky in scholarly and judicial circlesbrbrThis Article argues that critics have misdiagnosed the reason why the control test is an unsatisfying method of classifying workers and dispensing workrelated safeguards Controlbased analysis is faulty because it only captures one of the two conflicting ways in which workers scholars and decisionmakers think about freedom at work One of these ways freedom as noninterference is adequately captured by the control test The other freedom as nondomination is not The tension between these two conceptions of freedom both deeply entrenched in American culture explains why the concept of control has been both faulty and sticky when it comes to worker classification brbrDrawing on a firstofitskind body of ethnographic fieldwork among workers and policymakers across several sharing economy industries this Article begins by showing how workers themselves conceptualize freedom as both noninterference and nondomination It then goes on to show that both these conceptualizations of freedom also exist in case law and statutory law pertaining to work In doing so the Article demonstrates that there is no great divide between work law and work practices and that if anything the problem is that classification doctrine reflects and reinforces an irresolvable tension in the way lay and legal actors think about freedom at wor

Why does corporate governance matter for international business?

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