Hospital Acquired Infections: Advantages of a Computerized Surveillance

To asses the advantages of a computerized surveillance system to detect Healthcare-Associated Infections (HAI). All HAI reported to the Timis County branch of the Romanian National Health Insurance and the Public Health Authority during the year 2007 were collected and assessed for validityComment: 10 pages, exposed on 2nd "European Conference on Computer Science & Applications" - XA2008, Timisoara, Romani

Immunoinformatics-Driven Design of an HPV-16 and -18 Synthetic Long Peptide Vaccine

Background and Aim: Human papillomavirus types 16 and 18 cause most cervical cancers worldwide. Existing VLP-based vaccines are unable to eliminate ongoing highly oncogenic infections. This study suggests an SLP-based vaccine for already infected patients, even with precancerous lesions. Methods: HPV16/18 E6 and E7 proteins' potent HLA class I and class II-restricted epitopes were extracted from IEDB or predicted by ANNs (IC50 90% of the residues in the most favorable regions reflect good quality 3D structures. Molecular docking studies provided a ΔG of −13.20±1.42 kcal/mol, and an average Kd of 3.5×10−9 M. MD simulations reflect favorable thermodynamic properties, based on mild RMSD ([0.1;0.87] nm), RMSF, SASA (49.37±1.54 nm2) and Rgyr ([1.15;1.34]) fluctuations over the 100-ns simulations. Conclusions: 25 in silico-designed SLPs stimulate both innate and adaptive immunity, with little to no toxic or allergenic effects. The presented vaccination platform could exert both a therapeutic (by tumor cell clearance) and a prophylactic effect (by eradicating E6 and E7+ premalignant cells)