Media representation of teachers across five countries

This paper reports on an investigation into the representation of teachers in newspapers in five countries. An innovative methodology was used to develop a method of inquiry that supports a deeper understanding of media representations of teachers which can also be used by other researchers in comparative education. The paper explores relevant literature on teachers’ work and media studies,and describes the decisions made about the selection of newspapers from the five countries and the analytical framework. Central to the project was the development of an analytic framework which we applied to our analysis of the media data collected from the five countries. The process revealed the construction of four categories of teacher identity: the caring practitioner; the transparent (un)professional; the moral and social role model; and the transformative intellectual. The aim was not to generalise categories but to offer them as they were found in newspapers during this time frame. The data analysis demonstrates the applicability of the innovative methodology while the project also contributes to locally translated understandings of teacher representations. The paper concludes with a reflection on the effectiveness of the methodology for comparative research

Design of CD40 Agonists and Their Use in Growing B Cells for Cancer Immunotherapy

CD40 stimulation has produced impressive results in early-stage clinical trials of patients with cancer. Further progress will be facilitated by a better understanding of how the CD40 receptor becomes activated and the subsequent functions of CD40-stimulated immune cells. This review focuses on two aspects of this subject. The first is the recent recognition that signaling by CD40 is initiated when the receptors are induced to cluster within the membrane of responding cells. This requirement for CD40 clustering explains the stimulatory effects of certain anti-CD40 antibodies and the activity of many-trimer, but not one-trimer, forms of CD40 ligand (CD40L, CD154). The second topic is the use of these CD40 activators to expand B cells (“CD40-B cells”). As antigen-presenting cells (APCs), CD40-B cells are as effective as dendritic cells, with the important difference that CD40-B cells can be induced to proliferate in vitro whereas DCs proliferate poorly if at all. As a result, the use of CD40-B cells as antigen-presenting cells (APCs) promises to streamline the generation of anti-tumor CD8+ T cells for the adoptive cell therapy (ACT) of cancer