DOMINANT ATTRIBUTE AND MULTIPLE SCANNING APPROACHES FOR DISCRETIZATION OF NUMERICAL ATTRIBUTES

Rapid development of high throughput technologies and database management systems has made it possible to produce and store large amount of data. However, making sense of big data and discovering knowledge from it is a compounding challenge. Generally, data mining techniques search for information in datasets and express gained knowledge in the form of trends, regularities, patterns or rules. Rules are frequently identified automatically by a technique called rule induction, which is the most important technique in data mining and machine learning and it was developed primarily to handle symbolic data. However, real life data often contain numerical attributes and therefore, in order to fully utilize the power of rule induction techniques, an essential preprocessing step of converting numeric data into symbolic data called discretization is employed in data mining. Here we present two entropy based discretization techniques known as dominant attribute approach and multiple scanning approach, respectively. These approaches were implemented as two explicit algorithms in a JAVA programming language and experiments were conducted by applying each algorithm separately on seventeen well known numerical data sets. The resulting discretized data sets were used for rule induction by LEM2 or Learning from Examples Module 2 algorithm. For each dataset in multiple scanning approach, experiments were repeated with incremental scans until interval counts were stabilized. Preliminary results from this study indicated that multiple scanning approach performed better than dominant attribute approach in terms of producing comparatively smaller and simpler rule sets

Genomic profiling of human vascular cells identifies TWIST1 as a causal gene for common vascular diseases

Genome-wide association studies have identified multiple novel genomic loci associated with vascular diseases. Many of these loci are common non-coding variants that affect the expression of disease-relevant genes within coronary vascular cells. To identify such genes on a genome-wide level, we performed deep transcriptomic analysis of genotyped primary human coronary artery smooth muscle cells (HCASMCs) and coronary endothelial cells (HCAECs) from the same subjects, including splicing Quantitative Trait Loci (sQTL), allele-specific expression (ASE), and colocalization analyses. We identified sQTLs for TARS2, YAP1, CFDP1, and STAT6 in HCASMCs and HCAECs, and 233 ASE genes, a subset of which are also GTEx eGenes in arterial tissues. Colocalization of GWAS association signals for coronary artery disease (CAD), migraine, stroke and abdominal aortic aneurysm with GTEx eGenes in aorta, coronary artery and tibial artery discovered novel candidate risk genes for these diseases. At the CAD and stroke locus tagged by rs2107595 we demonstrate colocalization with expression of the proximal gene TWIST1. We show that disrupting the rs2107595 locus alters TWIST1 expression and that the risk allele has increased binding of the NOTCH signaling protein RBPJ. Finally, we provide data that TWIST1 expression influences vascular SMC phenotypes, including proliferation and calcification, as a potential mechanism supporting a role for TWIST1 in CAD

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

Cell-specific post-transcriptional regulation of γ-synuclein gene by micro-RNAs.

γ-Synuclein is a member of the synucleins family of small proteins, which consists of three members:α, β- and γ-synuclein. γ-Synuclein is abnormally expressed in a high percentage of advanced and metastatic tumors, but not in normal or benign tissues. Furthermore, γ-synuclein expression is strongly correlated with disease progression, and can stimulate proliferation, induce invasion and metastasis of cancer cells. γ-Synuclein transcription is regulated basically through the binding of AP-1 to specific sequences in intron 1. Here we show that γ-synuclein expression may be also regulated by micro RNAs (miRs) on post-transcriptional level. According to prediction by several methods, the 3'-untranslated region (UTR) of γ-synuclein gene contains targets for miRs. Insertion of γ-synuclein 3'-UTR downstream of the reporter luciferase (LUC) gene causes a 51% reduction of LUC activity after transfection into SKBR3 and Y79 cells, confirming the presence of efficient targets for miRs in this fragment. Expression of miR-4437 and miR-4674 for which putative targets in 3'-UTR were predicted caused a 61.2% and 60.1% reduction of endogenous γ-synuclein expression confirming their role in gene expression regulation. On the other hand, in cells overexpressing γ-synuclein no significant effect of miRs on γ-synuclein expression was found suggesting that miRs exert their regulatory effect only at low or moderate, but not at high level of γ-synuclein expression. Elevated level of γ-synuclein differentially changes the level of several miRs expression, upregulating the level of some miRs and downregulating the level of others. Three miRs upregulated as a result of γ-synuclein overexpression, i.e., miR-885-3p, miR-138 and miR-497 have putative targets in 3'-UTR of the γ-synuclein gene. Some of miRs differentially regulated by γ-synuclein may modulate signaling pathways and cancer related gene expression. This study demonstrates that miRs might provide cell-specific regulation of γ-synuclein expression and set the stage to further evaluate their role in pathophysiological processes

Synthesis based on cyclohexadienes: Part 30¹— Syntheses of 2-nor-cedrene and some analogues of funebrene

94-102A novel method for the construction of tricyclo[5 .3.1.01,5]undecane and tricyclo[6.3 .1 .0 1,6]dodecane frame work has been developed. Thus the alcohols 6, 18, 21 and 29 undergo Lewis acid-catalysed rearrangement to the tricyclic ketones 5, 19, 22 and 30. Dehydrogenation of 22 to the enone 23 proves the synchronous anti-migration of the methanobridge during the skeletal rearrangement. Finally, one carbon homologation of the ketones 5 and 19 leads to the syntheses of 2-norcedrene 4 and some analogues of funebrene 20 and 30