The Shocking Impact of Corporate Scandal on Directors\u27 and Officers\u27 Liability

Directors and officers liability (hereinafter D&O) serves as a deterrent to corporate wrongdoing. Recent cycles of corporate scandal have impacted the tools used to manage the risk that D&O liability creates. The impact of these scandals is a shock, which is a sudden event that alters the market profoundly. Market alteration has counter intuitively resulted in increased availability of D&O insurance at a lower price, despite an increase in D&O liability. With increased D&O coverage offerings at lower costs, the market has become soft, making coverage readily available. Carriers are competing for insureds and there is now a risk of undermining the deterrent effect that D&O liability provides. This paper explores whether D&O liability\u27s deterrent effect has been jeopardized in this soft D&O insurance marke

Evolving Regulation of Corporate Governance and the Implications for D&O Liability: The United States and Australia

This Article compares the modern corporate regulatory environments in the United States and Australia, including an analysis of the climate for Directors & Officers (D & O) liability coverage. Comparing these regulations across two large markets with similar historical bases for assessing director and officer liability allows us to explore which reforms may be more effective as new scandals emerge

Political strategies of external support for democratization

Political strategies of external support to democratization are contrasted and critically examined in respect of the United States and European Union. The analysis begins by defining its terms of reference and addresses the question of what it means to have a strategy. The account briefly notes the goals lying behind democratization support and their relationship with the wider foreign policy process, before considering what a successful strategy would look like and how that relates to the selection of candidates. The literature's attempts to identify strategy and its recommendations for better strategies are compared and assessed. Overall, the article argues that the question of political strategies of external support for democratization raises several distinct but related issues including the who?, what?, why?, and how? On one level, strategic choices can be expected to echo the comparative advantage of the "supporter." On a different level, the strategies cannot be divorced from the larger foreign policy framework. While it is correct to say that any sound strategy for support should be grounded in a theoretical understanding of democratization, the literature on strategies reveals something even more fundamental: divergent views about the nature of politics itself. The recommendations there certainly pinpoint weaknesses in the actual strategies of the United States and Europe but they have their own limitations too. In particular, in a world of increasing multi-level governance strategies for supporting democratization should go beyond preoccupation with just an "outside-in" approach

Gene Expression Analysis in the Thalamus and Cerebrum of Horses Experimentally Infected with West Nile Virus

Gene expression associated with West Nile virus (WNV) infection was profiled in the central nervous system of horses. Pyrosequencing and library annotation was performed on pooled RNA from the CNS and lymphoid tissues on horses experimentally infected with WNV (vaccinated and naïve) and non-exposed controls. These sequences were used to create a custom microarray enriched for neurological and immunological sequences to quantitate gene expression in the thalamus and cerebrum of three experimentally infected groups of horses (naïve/WNV exposed, vaccinated/WNV exposed, and normal)

Abstracts from the 8th International Conference on cGMP Generators, Effectors and Therapeutic Implications

This work was supported by a restricted research grant of Bayer AG

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