Development of hexyl-ester of aminolevulinic acid : the pioneering work of the Lausanne group.

Location Based Services are a key driver in today's telecom market, even if the power of Location Based Services is not nearly exhausted in nowadays telecom systems. To build intuitive Location Based Services for mobile handsets one success factor is to cover a broad range of mobile handsets available on the market and to make the services context aware. Within the EUREKA project MyMobileWeb we implement a framework to obtain contextual information from handsets using various capabilities of the mobiles. Contextual Information is every information we can obtain from the handset and that can be used for any kind of service. The most obvious information is location information. Within our framework we built an architecture that can obtain location information from various sources and is not bound to any special handset capability. Furthermore the architecture can be used to obtain various other context information, such as e.g. battery level. This information in addition is then used to offer special services to the customer. For this a correlation of the context information has to be done, which is based on a correlation engine for contextual information. This paper presents a framework that can handle and correlate contextual information in a very flexible way

"Adaptive response" - some underlying mechanisms and open questions

Organisms are affected by different DNA damaging agents naturally present in the environment or released as a result of human activity. Many defense mechanisms have evolved in organisms to minimize genotoxic damage. One of them is induced radioresistance or adaptive response. The adaptive response could be considered as a nonspecific phenomenon in which exposure to minimal stress could result in increased resistance to higher levels of the same or to other types of stress some hours later. A better understanding of the molecular mechanism underlying the adaptive response may lead to an improvement of cancer treatment, risk assessment and risk management strategies, radiation protection, e. g. of astronauts during long-term space flights. In this mini-review we discuss some open questions and the probable underlying mechanisms involved in adaptive response: the transcription of many genes and the activation of numerous signaling pathways that trigger cell defenses - DNA repair systems, induction of proteins synthesis, enhanced detoxification of free radicals and antioxidant production.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

Adjuvant chemotherapy for superficial transitional cell bladder carcinoma: Long-term results of a European organization for research and treatment of cancer randomized trial comparing doxorubicin, ethoglucid and transurethral resection alone

Purpose: We compared the efficacy of transurethral resection alone or transurethral resection followed by bladder instillations of doxorubicin or ethoglucid for 1 year in patients with superficial bladder carcinoma, and followed them long term for the incidence of progression to muscle invasion. Materials and Methods: A total of 443 patients with superficial transitional cell carcinoma of the bladder was randomized. After randomization of 206 patients the control arm was closed to patient entry based on the results of an interim analysis showing a significant difference in favor of those receiving adjuvant chemotherapy. Results: Final analysis of treatment results for recurrence included 432 patients at a median followup of 3.4 years for time to first recurrence, 5 years for analysis of time to invasion (Category T2 disease or worse) and 10.7 years for duration of survival. Time to first recurrence was significantly prolonged by both drugs compared to transurethral resection alone (doxorubicin versus transurethral resection alone p <0.001 and ethoglucid versus control p <0.001). Recurrence rate per year was 0.30 for both adjuvant treatment arms and 0.68 for the resection only group. Progression to muscle invasion was rare (15.1% of cases) and not apparently different in the 3 treatment arms. Of the 423 patients death from any cause in 199 and from malignant disease in 59 was not correlated with treatment. However, there was a strong correlation between death from malignant disease, and T category and tumor grade. Conclusions: In regard to time to first recurrence and recurrence rate per year this study indicates that adjuvant chemotherapy with doxorubicin and ethoglucid using the indicated schedule is superior to transurethral resection alone. However, progression in stage or survival was not influenced by the treatment regimen