Discovery of Novel Pyridine Derivatives as Anti-Cancer Agents

The International Agency for Research on Cancer indicated that cancer burden was raised in 2012 to 14.1 million incidence cases and 8.2 mortality cases. Consequently, novel approaches are urgently required for further improvement in existing cancer therapies. Synthesis of the pyridine ring system and its derivatives occupy an important place in the realm of synthetic organic chemistry, due to their therapeutic and pharmacological properties. The current study investigated the anti-cancer activity of novel pyridine derivatives. Twenty novel Pyridine Derivatives were screened using WST-1 assay on several cell lines to assess their toxicity and to determine whether the effect is tumor or cell type specific. Dose response curves were obtained for compound 9a for further investigations. Detection of apoptosis and cell cycle checkpoint analysis was done using flow cytometry and expression of several apoptotic and anti-apoptotic proteins was carried out by Western Blot. Initial screening revealed that 100μM treatment with pyridine derivatives for the above mentioned cell lines for 24 hours suppressed the viability as follows: compound 9a reduced the viability by 40% in MCF-7 cells and by 45% in HCT-116, compound 7b reduced the viability in SKOV-3 by 35% and finally compound 11 suppressed the viability of SKOV-3 by 44%. Compound 9a induced growth inhibition in MCF-7 cells and resulted in the induction of apoptosis with an IC50 of 20μM. It upregulated the expression of p53, Bax and Caspase-3 in MCF-7 cells. In addition, it caused significant down-regulation of Bcl-2, Mdm-2 and Akt. Compound 9a exhibited less toxicity on non-tumorigenic breast epithelial cell line MCF-12a. Findings of the study indicated that compound 9a possesses potent anti-proliferative activity against MCF-7 cells and could be a promising chemotherapeutic agent with less toxicity on non-tumorigenic cells. Further screening and investigating molecular mechanisms of this potent agent on other cancer cell lines is highly required

Scraping social media photos posted in Kenya and elsewhere to detect and analyze food types

Monitoring population-level changes in diet could be useful for education and for implementing interventions to improve health. Research has shown that data from social media sources can be used for monitoring dietary behavior. We propose a scrape-by-location methodology to create food image datasets from Instagram posts. We used it to collect 3.56 million images over a period of 20 days in March 2019. We also propose a scrape-by-keywords methodology and used it to scrape ∼30,000 images and their captions of 38 Kenyan food types. We publish two datasets of 104,000 and 8,174 image/caption pairs, respectively. With the first dataset, Kenya104K, we train a Kenyan Food Classifier, called KenyanFC, to distinguish Kenyan food from non-food images posted in Kenya. We used the second dataset, KenyanFood13, to train a classifier KenyanFTR, short for Kenyan Food Type Recognizer, to recognize 13 popular food types in Kenya. The KenyanFTR is a multimodal deep neural network that can identify 13 types of Kenyan foods using both images and their corresponding captions. Experiments show that the average top-1 accuracy of KenyanFC is 99% over 10,400 tested Instagram images and of KenyanFTR is 81% over 8,174 tested data points. Ablation studies show that three of the 13 food types are particularly difficult to categorize based on image content only and that adding analysis of captions to the image analysis yields a classifier that is 9 percent points more accurate than a classifier that relies only on images. Our food trend analysis revealed that cakes and roasted meats were the most popular foods in photographs on Instagram in Kenya in March 2019.Accepted manuscrip

Virus-like particle vaccinology, from bench to bedside.

Virus-like particles (VLPs) have become key tools in biology, medicine and even engineering. After their initial use to resolve viral structures at the atomic level, VLPs were rapidly harnessed to develop antiviral vaccines followed by their use as display platforms to generate any kind of vaccine. Most recently, VLPs have been employed as nanomachines to deliver pharmaceutically active products to specific sites and into specific cells in the body. Here, we focus on the use of VLPs for the development of vaccines with broad fields of indications ranging from classical vaccines against viruses to therapeutic vaccines against chronic inflammation, pain, allergy and cancer. In this review, we take a walk through time, starting with the latest developments in experimental preclinical VLP-based vaccines and ending with marketed vaccines, which earn billions of dollars every year, paving the way for the next wave of prophylactic and therapeutic vaccines already visible on the horizon

UTILIZATION OF ION-PAIR COMPLEX FORMATION FOR THE SPECTROPHOTOMETRIC DETERMINATION OF SOME ANTIDEPRESSANT DRUGS IN PHARMACEUTICAL FORMULATIONS

Objective: A new, simple and sensitive spectrophotometric method has been developed for the determination of some antidepressant drugs, namely desvenlafaxine (DSV), dapoxetine (DAP) and citalopram (CIT) in pharmaceutical formulations.Methods: The proposed method was based on the formation of yellow colored ion-pair complex between the studied drugs and two sulphonphthalein dyes viz., bromophenol blue (BPB), and bromothymol blue (BTB) in acidic medium. The optimizations of the reaction conditions were investigated. Beer's law limits, Sandell's sensitivity, correlation coefficient, detection, and quantification limits were calculated.Results: The formed complexes showed absorption maxima at 412 nm and 410 nm measured for all the drugs with BPB and BTB, respectively. The Job's method of continuous variations indicated that a single l: l ion-pair complex was formed. Calibration curves were linear over the concentration range of 0.8–11.4, 0.8–6.4 and 0.8–8.0 μg/ml for DSV, DAP and CIT, respectively.Conclusion: The proposed method has been applied successfully for the analysis of the investigated drugs in pure and in their dosage forms. No interference was observed from common excipients present in pharmaceutical formulations. The proposed method is suitable for quality control applications.Keywords: Desvenlafaxine, Dapoxetine, Citalopram, Sulphonphthalein dyes, Extraction spectrophotometry, Pharmaceutical formulation

Evidence-Based Medicine; Climbing a Mountain for a Better Decision-Making

Evidence-Based Medicine is a relatively new term used in medical sittings and Health Information Technology (HIT). It is a form of medicine that integrates practitioners’ expertise with the best available practical evidences to improve better patient care. Evidence-Based Medicine has increasingly been used and incorporated into daily medical practices to overcome the shortcomings in the conventional standard care. The purpose of this literature review is to highlight the importance of Evidence-Based Medicine and how it can act as a crucial tool in decision-making to empower the quality of medical services for better patient outcomes

Associations between sibling relationship quality and friendship quality in early adolescence : looking at the case of twins

Bidirectional pathways between twin relationship quality and friendship quality were investigated in a large longitudinal twin cohort. We examined negative and positive relationship features in 313 monozygotic (MZ) twins and 238 same-sex dizygotic (DZ) twins from ages 13 to 14 years, using latent structural modeling. Results showed stronger stability of the twin relationship quality compared to friendship quality. Positive features in the sibling relationship were associated with increased positive features in the relationship with the best friend a year later. In contrast, no significant association between negative sibling relationship features and change in negative friendship quality features was found. These findings speak to the important role of the sibling relationship in the development of good quality friendship relations in twins

Increased receptor affinity of SARS-CoV-2: a new immune escape mechanism.

‘Affinity escape’: Novel SARS-CoV-2 variants may escape immunity by raising the RBD-ACE2 affinity high enough to outcompete the avidity of neutralizing antibodies

Analysis of Factors Related to Compliance with the Use of Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) in Clinical Laborator Hospital Dr. Ibnu Sutowo Baturaja

Background: Laboratory of dr. Ibnu Sutowo Baturaja local Hospital was a hospital that has a risk of considerable danger injured at work in his laboratory personnel. Compliance Use of Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) in the laboratory is important to always be applied by the laboratory staff. This study was conducted to analyze the factors associated with compliance with the use of Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) in the laboratory personnel. Method: The study design was observational and the type of research is a qualitative research. The informants as many as six people, and the data retrieved by conducting in-depth interviews, examine documents and compare with the results of observation. Analysis of the data using the data triagulasi, including triangulation of sources, methods, and data. Results: The use of Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) is already used by officials, but the use of PPE is less than the maximum. Laboratory workers have the motivation, knowledge, perception is quite good, but in practice they only laboratory workers do not use PPE properly complete. Regulation, supervision and Standard Operational Procedures (SOP) had been applied but not maximized. Conclusion: It can be concluded that the compliance of the use of Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) in the laboratory staff has been good, but less than the maximum we recommend the use of other types of PPE such as headgear and laboratory shoes use as well

Students’ Use of Internet Technologies for Interactions in Learning Practices: A Study from Saudi Arabia’s Higher Education

Internet technologies provide support for students’ learning practices. Some Internet technologies are supported on an organisational level such as learning management systems (LMS) while others are adopted voluntarily by academics and students such as social networking sites (SNSs). Given the unique culture of Saudi Arabia where communication and interaction norms are strictly defined by strong traditions, little is known about the use patterns of these diverse technologies to support student interactions with peers and academics within tertiary learning practices. This qualitative study was conducted in two Saudi universities where seventeen students and twelve academics from both genders were interviewed. The study showed how students tend to communicate with academics in a formal way, create their own online community and interact with external tutors through online paid websites. These interaction patterns are discussed considering the national culture, learning styles and organisational regulation

Vitamin K2 Facilitating Inter-Organ Cross-Talk

This chapter features how vitamin K2 is instrumental in bringing about inter-organ communication, thus facilitating (a) a synthesis/secretion of the endocrine, humoral factors from various organs and (b) physiological responses to the said factors by a multitude of organ systems of the body, thus creating a ‘lattice’ of reciprocal regulatory loops in order to ensure endocrine homeostasis