The Grizzly, September 15, 1998

Where\u27s Your Money Going? • Kenneth Starr\u27s XXX-Files • Pfahler Hall Renovations: The Sound of Progress • Opinion: Has America Sunk to the Level of Terrorists?; Academic Computing: Beneficial or Detrimental?; How Efficient Will the New Mail System Be? • Poets in Our Midst • RLO = One Big Happy Family • The Man from La Mancha has Gone Home • Addition Made to the History Department • Statues Breathe Life into Ursinus • Elyssa Rundle: The Spirit of the Paint • Big Big Band at UC • New Addition to Ursinus Training Staff • Men\u27s Soccer Plagued by Injuries • Football Back on Track • Women\u27s Soccer Shuts Out Washington • Field Hockey Drops Two Close Ones • Hinkle Named Player of the Week • UC Cross Country • UC Volleyball Improves to 7-1https://digitalcommons.ursinus.edu/grizzlynews/1423/thumbnail.jp

31st Annual Meeting and Associated Programs of the Society for Immunotherapy of Cancer (SITC 2016) : part two

Background The immunological escape of tumors represents one of the main ob- stacles to the treatment of malignancies. The blockade of PD-1 or CTLA-4 receptors represented a milestone in the history of immunotherapy. However, immune checkpoint inhibitors seem to be effective in specific cohorts of patients. It has been proposed that their efficacy relies on the presence of an immunological response. Thus, we hypothesized that disruption of the PD-L1/PD-1 axis would synergize with our oncolytic vaccine platform PeptiCRAd. Methods We used murine B16OVA in vivo tumor models and flow cytometry analysis to investigate the immunological background. Results First, we found that high-burden B16OVA tumors were refractory to combination immunotherapy. However, with a more aggressive schedule, tumors with a lower burden were more susceptible to the combination of PeptiCRAd and PD-L1 blockade. The therapy signifi- cantly increased the median survival of mice (Fig. 7). Interestingly, the reduced growth of contralaterally injected B16F10 cells sug- gested the presence of a long lasting immunological memory also against non-targeted antigens. Concerning the functional state of tumor infiltrating lymphocytes (TILs), we found that all the immune therapies would enhance the percentage of activated (PD-1pos TIM- 3neg) T lymphocytes and reduce the amount of exhausted (PD-1pos TIM-3pos) cells compared to placebo. As expected, we found that PeptiCRAd monotherapy could increase the number of antigen spe- cific CD8+ T cells compared to other treatments. However, only the combination with PD-L1 blockade could significantly increase the ra- tio between activated and exhausted pentamer positive cells (p= 0.0058), suggesting that by disrupting the PD-1/PD-L1 axis we could decrease the amount of dysfunctional antigen specific T cells. We ob- served that the anatomical location deeply influenced the state of CD4+ and CD8+ T lymphocytes. In fact, TIM-3 expression was in- creased by 2 fold on TILs compared to splenic and lymphoid T cells. In the CD8+ compartment, the expression of PD-1 on the surface seemed to be restricted to the tumor micro-environment, while CD4 + T cells had a high expression of PD-1 also in lymphoid organs. Interestingly, we found that the levels of PD-1 were significantly higher on CD8+ T cells than on CD4+ T cells into the tumor micro- environment (p < 0.0001). Conclusions In conclusion, we demonstrated that the efficacy of immune check- point inhibitors might be strongly enhanced by their combination with cancer vaccines. PeptiCRAd was able to increase the number of antigen-specific T cells and PD-L1 blockade prevented their exhaus- tion, resulting in long-lasting immunological memory and increased median survival

Part and Parcel: State Dreams and the Excesses of Home in the Pilipinx Balikbayan Box

The balikbayan box is a large cardboard box sent by Pilipinx migrants back to the homeland. Tax-free, duty-free, with no weight limit, the box is packed with everyday items, from clothes, toiletries, appliances, to, of course, the ubiquitous canned meats. While it is sent on the premise of economy and pragmatism, that logic quickly falls apart as the contents are often available locally and sometimes even criticized for their useless contents. The question of the practice turns from simply “why not send money” to what does sending a variety of objects do that sending only money could not? And so the balikbayan box emerges out of the ethos of migration fostered by the labor brokerage state of the Philippines that seeks to market out the labor of its population. In its form as a box full of seemingly valueless items, it is a critique of global capitalism, but is simultaneously imbued with the consumerist culture it seeks to devalue because of the economic aspirations that the ethos of migration inspires. It captures dreams that run beyond and through capitalism and seek imported commodities, but denies consumerism its valence by forming worth out of the wrong items, accumulating the objects that are supposed to be discarded. Instead, it values the priceless affect of home and family expressed through its waste. Footnotes in this project are also vignettes from the author’s memory, weaving the affect and excesses of the personal into the text, just as the box seeks to capture home

Genuine agrarian reform program: A constitutional analysis of house bill 3059

This paper primarily focused on the constitutionality of House Bill 3059 or the Genuine Agrarian Reform Program. The researchers of this thesis discussed, presented ideas and answered the corollary issues of the study in order to arrive at the conclusion that answered the main issue of whether or not the passing of the Genuine Agrarian Reform Bill (GARB) is valid and constitutional. The researchers recommend that the constitutionality of the other provisions of the bill be investigated to further identify its flaws and the violations of its provisions against the constitution. Also to push for a simple Bill that aims to extent the funding program and subscribers for amendments of some provision of RA No. 6657 (Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Law)

A study on seasonal and cyclical movements of 91-, 182-, and 364-day Philippine treasury bills for the period 1984-1999

The objective of this study is to be able to find seasonal and cyclical movements in t-bill rates. In order to determine if 91-, 182-, and 364-day t-bill rates do have seasonal patterns, a tabulation of their proportions and significance tests concerning these proportions were done in order to prove that seasonality exists. The results show that for the 1st week concerning the said t-bill rates, a significant proportion is found to be considerably highest, as for the week with the lowest rate-there were no significant results to validate this hypothesis. The months with the highest proportion was January, but after the test of proportions was done, no significant differences were discovered between January and other months. The same can be said for determining the month that has the lowest average t-bill rate. The test of the significance of seasonality was then used in order to determine if the seasonality enough to affect the t-bill rates. This is due to the fact that if historical data were used to determine future values, the presence of seasonality will greatly affect the predictive power of these rates. The Kruskal-Wallis test of seasonality or the H-test was used to prove that in the t-bills do have significant seasonality. The 91-, 182, and 364-day Philippine t-bills are proven to contain seasonality. When these data are used to predict seasonality, they will greatly affect the forecasted rates, so it would be best to use the latest data in order to predict the weekly and monthly rates for the first quarter of the year 2000. The next step is to determine if there are cyclical movements in t-bills, it was proven that cyclical movements do exist. There were three cyclical movements found and each was affected by extraneous variables. These cyclical movements ranged from a minimal period of three years to a maximum of seven years. The three cycles that were found started from January 1984 and ended on February 1987, then began again February 1987 to October 1994 and the last cycle was from October 1994, to July 1999. The study then used the historical data to attempt to predict future t-bill rates or their averages (both monthly and weekly) to determine if historical data can be used to predict the future values of t-bill rates. Application of various forecasting models were then implemented in order to determine what mathematical model would best explain the movements of the data gathered. The naive model was used and it proved that historical data could not be used to effectively forecast t-bill rates. The results of the forecasts showed that they were inaccurate. Because when they were compared against the available actual weekly and monthly rates for the specified period, the predicted rates fell below the actual rates. It was only for the 182-day monthly did the forecast hold true. These results show that the historical data of the t-bills cannot be used to forecast their future movements