Immunotherapy, Inflammation and Colorectal Cancer.

Colorectal cancer (CRC) is the third most common cancer type, and third highest in mortality rates among cancer-related deaths in the United States. Originating from intestinal epithelial cells in the colon and rectum, that are impacted by numerous factors including genetics, environment and chronic, lingering inflammation, CRC can be a problematic malignancy to treat when detected at advanced stages. Chemotherapeutic agents serve as the historical first line of defense in the treatment of metastatic CRC. In recent years, however, combinational treatment with targeted therapies, such as vascular endothelial growth factor, or epidermal growth factor receptor inhibitors, has proven to be quite effective in patients with specific CRC subtypes. While scientific and clinical advances have uncovered promising new treatment options, the five-year survival rate for metastatic CRC is still low at about 14%. Current research into the efficacy of immunotherapy, particularly immune checkpoint inhibitor therapy (ICI) in mismatch repair deficient and microsatellite instability high (dMMR-MSI-H) CRC tumors have shown promising results, but its use in other CRC subtypes has been either unsuccessful, or not extensively explored. This Review will focus on the current status of immunotherapies, including ICI, vaccination and adoptive T cell therapy (ATC) in the treatment of CRC and its potential use, not only in dMMR-MSI-H CRC, but also in mismatch repair proficient and microsatellite instability low (pMMR-MSI-L)

Providing real-time assistance in disaster relief by leveraging crowdsourcing power

Crowdsourcing platforms for disaster management have drawn a lot of attention in recent years due to their efficiency in disaster relief tasks, especially for disaster data collection and analysis. Although the on-site rescue staff can largely benefit from these crowdsourcing data, due to the rapidly evolving situation at the disaster site, they usually encounter various difficulties and have requests, which need to be resolved in a short time. In this paper, aiming at efficiently harnessing crowdsourcing power to provide those on-site rescue staff with real-time remote assistance, we design and develop a crowdsourcing disaster support platform by considering three unique features, viz., selecting and notifying relevant off-site users for individual request according to their expertise; providing collaborative working functionalities to off-site users; improving answer credibility via “crowd voting.” To evaluate the platform, we conducted a series of experiments with three-round user trials and also a System Usability Scale survey after each trial. The results show that the platform can effectively support on-site rescue staff by leveraging crowdsourcing power and achieve good usability

Chemical and dynamical identification of emission outflows during the HALO campaign EMeRGe in Europe and Asia

The number of large urban agglomerations is steadily increasing worldwide. At a local scale, their emissions lead to air pollution, directly affecting people\u27s health. On a global scale, their emissions lead to an increase of greenhouse gases, affecting climate. In this context, in 2017 and 2018, the airborne campaign EMeRGe (Effect of Megacities on the transport and transformation of pollutants on the Regional to Global scales) investigated emissions of European and Asian major population centres (MPCs) to improve the understanding and predictability of pollution outflows. Here, we present two methods to identify and characterise pollution outflows probed during EMeRGe. First, we use a set of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) as chemical tracers to characterise air masses by specific source signals, i.e. benzene from anthropogenic pollution of targeted regions, acetonitrile from biomass burning (BB, primarily during EMeRGe-Asia), and isoprene from fresh biogenic signals (primarily during EMeRGe-Europe. Second, we attribute probed air masses to source regions and estimate their individual contribution by constructing and applying a simple emission uptake scheme for the boundary layer which combines FLEXTRA back trajectories and EDGAR carbon monoxide (CO) emission rates (acronyms are provided in the Appendix). During EMeRGe-Europe, we identified anthropogenic pollution outflows from northern Italy, southern Great Britain, the Belgium–Netherlands–Ruhr (BNR) area and the Iberian Peninsula. Additionally, our uptake scheme indicates significant long-range transport of pollution from the USA and Canada. During EMeRGe-Asia, the pollution outflow is dominated by sources in China and Taiwan, but BB signals from Southeast Asia and India contribute as well. Outflows of pre-selected MPC targets are identified in less than 20 % of the sampling time, due to restrictions in flight planning and constraints of the measurement platform itself. Still, EMeRGe combines in a unique way near- and far-field measurements, which show signatures of local and distant sources, transport and conversion fingerprints, and complex air mass compositions. Our approach provides a valuable classification and characterisation of the EMeRGe dataset, e.g. for BB and anthropogenic influence of potential source regions and paves the way for a more comprehensive analysis and various model studies

A novel helicopter-borne application for quantifying methane emissions from industrial activities: Results from measurements of coal mine ventilation shafts in Poland

The Upper Silesian Coal Basin in southern Poland is one of the strongest emitters of anthropogenic methane (CH4) in Europe. Coal mine ventilation shafts are responsible for a major part of these CH4 emissions, which were in focus of the METHANE-To-Go-Poland project presented here. For the first time, the unique helicopter towed probe HELiPOD was used to estimate CH4 mass fluxes from selected ventilation shafts based on the mass balance approach. The HELiPOD (weight 325 kg, length 5 m) was equipped with a sensor system for measuring the 3D wind vector and in situ methane analysers (Picarro G2401-m and Licor-7700) to measure CH4 with a high precision (1 ppb) and high temporal resolution (up to 40 Hz). In June and October 2022, repeated upwind and downwind probing of four selected shafts were performed within 16 flights at different horizontal distances from the source (~500 m - 5 km) and altitudes (~50 m – 2 km) to capture the inflow and horizontal/vertical dispersion of the CH4 plumes. Depending on wind speed, wind direction and atmospheric stability, suitable flight patterns were developed for every flight. Co-located mobile ground-based CH4 measurements complemented the airborne probing. In addition, two controlled CH4 releases were successfully carried out to prove the novel measurement concept. In this presentation, top-down mass flux estimates based on measurements from the two airborne CH4 instruments (with different temporal resolution) will be compared and mass flux uncertainties will be discussed with respect to the flight strategies and meteorological conditions. Depending on the surveyed shaft, the calculated CH4 mass fluxes range from 1000 to 3000 kg/h. Subsequently, the top-down mass fluxes will be compared to bottom-up mass flux calculations based on production data obtained directly from the coal mine industry. Our calculations are an example of the independent emission verification technique and will help coal, oil and gas companies as well as governments, to prioritize their CH4 emission mitigation strategies, actions and policies. This research has been funded in the framework of UNEP's International Methane Emissions Observatory