Parameter estimation of the kinetic α-Pinene isomerization model using the MCSfilter algorithm

This paper aims to illustrate the application of a derivative-free multistart algorithm with coordinate search filter, designated as the MCSFilter algorithm. The problem used in this study is the parameter estimation problem of the kinetic α -pinene isomerization model. This is a well known nonlinear optimization problem (NLP) that has been investigated as a case study for performance testing of most derivative based methods proposed in the literature. Since the MCSFilter algorithm features a stochastic component, it was run ten times to solve the NLP problem. The optimization problem was successfully solved in all the runs and the optimal solution demonstrates that the MCSFilter provides a good quality solution.(undefined)info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

A tetravalent dengue nanoparticle stimulates antibody production in mice

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Dengue is a major public health problem worldwide, especially in the tropical and subtropical regions of the world. Infection with a single <it>Dengue virus </it>(DENV) serotype causes a mild, self-limiting febrile illness called dengue fever. However, a subset of patients experiencing secondary infection with a different serotype progresses to the severe form of the disease, dengue hemorrhagic fever/dengue shock syndrome. Currently, there are no licensed vaccines or antiviral drugs to prevent or treat dengue infections. Biodegradable nanoparticles coated with proteins represent a promising method for in vivo delivery of vaccines.</p> <p>Findings</p> <p>Here, we used a murine model to evaluate the IgG production after administration of inactivated DENV corresponding to all four serotypes adsorbed to bovine serum albumin nanoparticles. This formulation induced a production of anti-DENV IgG antibodies (p < 0.001). However, plaque reduction neutralization assays with the four DENV serotypes revealed that these antibodies have no neutralizing activity in the dilutions tested.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>Our results show that while the nanoparticle system induces humoral responses against DENV, further investigation with different DENV antigens will be required to improve immunogenicity, epitope specicity, and functional activity to make this platform a viable option for DENV vaccines.</p

Murine model for Fusarium oxysporum invasive fusariosis reveals organ-specific structures for dissemination and long-term persistence

Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Interstellar Turbulence II: Implications and Effects

Interstellar turbulence has implications for the dispersal and mixing of the elements, cloud chemistry, cosmic ray scattering, and radio wave propagation through the ionized medium. This review discusses the observations and theory of these effects. Metallicity fluctuations are summarized, and the theory of turbulent transport of passive tracers is reviewed. Modeling methods, turbulent concentration of dust grains, and the turbulent washout of radial abundance gradients are discussed. Interstellar chemistry is affected by turbulent transport of various species between environments with different physical properties and by turbulent heating in shocks, vortical dissipation regions, and local regions of enhanced ambipolar diffusion. Cosmic rays are scattered and accelerated in turbulent magnetic waves and shocks, and they generate turbulence on the scale of their gyroradii. Radio wave scintillation is an important diagnostic for small scale turbulence in the ionized medium, giving information about the power spectrum and amplitude of fluctuations. The theory of diffraction and refraction is reviewed, as are the main observations and scintillation regions.Comment: 46 pages, 2 figures, submitted to Annual Reviews of Astronomy and Astrophysic

Disruption of Growth Hormone Receptor Prevents Calorie Restriction from Improving Insulin Action and Longevity

Most mutations that delay aging and prolong lifespan in the mouse are related to somatotropic and/or insulin signaling. Calorie restriction (CR) is the only intervention that reliably increases mouse longevity. There is considerable phenotypic overlap between long-lived mutant mice and normal mice on chronic CR. Therefore, we investigated the interactive effects of CR and targeted disruption or knock out of the growth hormone receptor (GHRKO) in mice on longevity and the insulin signaling cascade. Every other day feeding corresponds to a mild (i.e. 15%) CR which increased median lifespan in normal mice but not in GHRKO mice corroborating our previous findings on the effects of moderate (30%) CR on the longevity of these animals. To determine why insulin sensitivity improves in normal but not GHRKO mice in response to 30% CR, we conducted insulin stimulation experiments after one year of CR. In normal mice, CR increased the insulin stimulated activation of the insulin signaling cascade (IR/IRS/PI3K/AKT) in liver and muscle. Livers of GHRKO mice responded to insulin by increased activation of the early steps of insulin signaling, which was dissipated by altered PI3K subunit abundance which putatively inhibited AKT activation. In the muscle of GHRKO mice, there was elevated downstream activation of the insulin signaling cascade (IRS/PI3K/AKT) in the absence of elevated IR activation. Further, we found a major reduction of inhibitory Ser phosphorylation of IRS-1 seen exclusively in GHRKO muscle which may underpin their elevated insulin sensitivity. Chronic CR failed to further modify the alterations in insulin signaling in GHRKO mice as compared to normal mice, likely explaining or contributing to the absence of CR effects on insulin sensitivity and longevity in these long-lived mice

Abordagem sócio-histórica sobre a evolução da assistência ao parto num município de médio porte de Minas Gerais (1960-2001)

Trata-se de caracterizar a evolução da série histórica quanto ao tipo de parto, normal, cesárea e fórceps, no período de 1960 a 2001, nas três maternidades mais antigas e conveniadas ao Sistema Único de Saúde (SUS) de Juiz de Fora. O método utilizado denomina-se história serial e permite a comparabilidade entre eventos históricos em determinado período de tempo. Foi identificado o aumento de incorporação tecnológica nesta trajetória e o crescente uso da cesariana até 1998, quando se identifica o impacto da portaria nº 2816, proposta pelo Ministério da Saúde, através de inversão dessa tendência com elevação do número de partos normais. A diferenciação constatada do tipo de parto de acordo com a categoria de internação aponta para uma discussão marcadamente política, que diz respeito às relações sociais em que se entrelaçam desigualdades de diversas ordens, entre elas as de gênero e de classe social. Conhecer as desigualdades e problematizar sua existência, traduzida em perfis de morbimortalidade e padrões desiguais de assistência, é precondição para obter o encaminhamento da solução

Opportunistic screening for skin cancer using a mobile unit in Brazil

Abstract Background Skin cancer is the most common malignancy in the white population worldwide. In Brazil, the National Cancer Institute (INCA) estimates that in 2010 there will be 119,780 and 5,930 new cases of non-melanoma skin cancer and melanoma, respectively. The aim of this study was to evaluate the use of a mobile unit in the diagnosis and treatment of skin cancer in several poor regions of Brazil. Methods The diagnosis of skin cancer was accomplished through active medical screening in the prevention Mobile Unit (MU) of Barretos Cancer Hospital (BCH). The study population consisted of patients examined in the MU between 2004 and 2007, and their suspicious lesions were subjected to histopathological evaluation. Data were collected prospectively from standardized forms and analyzed. Results During the screening, 17,857 consultations were carried out. A total of 2012 (11.2%) cases of skin cancer were diagnosed. The predominant histological type reported was basal cell carcinoma (n = 1,642 or 81.6%), followed by squamous cell carcinoma (n = 303 or 15.1%), Bowen's disease (n = 25 or 1.2%), malignant melanoma (n = 23 or 1.1%), basosquamous cell carcinoma (n = 3 or 0.1%), miscellaneous lesions (12 or 0.6%), and metatypical carcinoma (n = 4 or 0.2%). Only 0.6% of lesions were stage III. There were no stage IV non-melanoma skin lesions, as well as no melanomas stages III and IV, found. Conclusions It was observed that the MU can be a useful tool for early skin cancer diagnosis and treatment. This program probably is important, especially in developing countries with inadequate public health systems and social inequality

Treatment of advanced hepatocellular carcinoma with very low levels of amplitude-modulated electromagnetic

BACKGROUND: Therapeutic options for patients with advanced hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) are limited. There is emerging evidence that the growth of cancer cells may be altered by very low levels of electromagnetic fields modulated at specific frequencies. METHODS: A single-group, open-label, phase I/II study was performed to assess the safety and effectiveness of the intrabuccal administration of very low levels of electromagnetic fields amplitude modulated at HCC-specific frequencies in 41 patients with advanced HCC and limited therapeutic options. Three-daily 60-min outpatient treatments were administered until disease progression or death. Imaging studies were performed every 8 weeks. The primary efficacy end point was progression-free survival X6 months. Secondary efficacy end points were progression-free survival and overall survival. RESULTS: Treatment was well tolerated and there were no NCI grade 2, 3 or 4 toxicities. In all, 14 patients (34.1%) had stable disease for more than 6 months. Median progression-free survival was 4.4 months (95% CI 2.1 -5.3) and median overall survival was 6.7 months (95% CI 3.0 -10.2). There were three partial and one near complete responses. CONCLUSION: Treatment with intrabuccally administered amplitude-modulated electromagnetic fields is safe, well tolerated, and shows evidence of antitumour effects in patients with advanced HCC. British Journal of Cancer (2011Cancer ( ) 105, 640 -648. doi:10.1038Cancer ( /bjc.2011 Published online 9 August 2011 &amp; 2011 Cancer Research UK Keywords: hepatocellular carcinoma; phase II study; radiofrequency electromagnetic fields; tumour-specific modulation frequencies; 27.12 MHz Treatment of inoperable or metastatic solid tumours is a major challenge in oncology, which is limited by the small number of therapeutic agents that are both well tolerated and capable of longterm control of tumour growth. Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is the second most common cause of cancer death in men and the sixth in women worldwide Therapies for HCC are limited. Resections of the primary tumour or liver transplantation are the preferred therapeutic approaches in patients who are surgical candidates The intrabuccal administration of low and safe levels of electromagnetic fields, which are amplitude-modulated at disease-specific frequencies (RF AM EMF) PATIENTS AND METHODS Patients The study was aimed at offering treatment to patients with ChildPugh A or B advanced HCC and limited therapeutic options. Patients were classified as having advanced disease if they were not eligible for surgical resection or had disease progression after surgical or locoregional therapies or had disease progression after chemotherapy or sorafenib therapy. Patients with measurable, inoperable HCC were eligible for enrolment. Previous local or systemic treatments were allowed as long as they were discontinued at least 4 weeks before enrolment. Inclusion criteria included Eastern Cooperative Oncology Group performance status of 0, 1, or 2 and biopsy-confirmed HCC. Also allowed were patients with no pathological confirmation of HCC with a level of a-fetoprotein higher than 400 ng ml À1 and characteristic imaging findings as assessed by multislice computer tomography (CT) scan or intravenous contrast ultrasound (US). As per the University of São Paulo Department of Transplantation and Liver Surgery guidelines, liver biopsies are avoided in patients eligible for transplant or with severely impaired liver function. Exclusion criteria included confirmed or suspected brain metastasis, Child -Pugh C, previous liver transplant, and pregnancy. Study design This was an investigator-initiated, single centre, uncontrolled phase I/II trial in patients with advanced HCC. The trial was approved by the local human investigation committee and conducted in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki. Written informed consent was obtained from each patient. The protocol was registered: clinicaltrial.gov identifier no. NCT00534664. Translational Therapeutics Administration of AM EMFs The generator of AM EMFs consists of a battery-driven radiofrequency (RF) EMF generator connected to a 1.5 m long 50 O coaxial cable, to the other end of which a stainless-steel spoonshaped mouthpiece is connected via an impedance transformer ( We have previously reported the discovery of HCC-specific modulation frequencies in 46 patients with HCC using a patientbased biofeedback approach and shown the feasibility of using AM EMFs for the treatment of patients with cancer The treatment method consists of the administration of AM EMFs by means of an electrically conducting mouthpiece, which is Translational Therapeutics in direct contact with the oral mucosa ( Efficacy end points and disease assessment The primary end point of this trial was the proportion of patients progression-free at 6 months. Secondary end points were progression-free survival (PFS) (first day of treatment until progression of disease or death) and overall survival (OS) (first day of receiving treatment to death). Objective response was assessed using the Response Evaluation Criteria in Solid Tumours group classification for patients with disease assessed by either helical multiphasic CT (Therasse et al, 2000). Whenever contrastenhanced US radiological assessment was used, it was performed and reviewed by the same radiologist specialised in HCC (MCC) as this imaging modality is investigator dependent. Tumour measurements were performed at baseline and every 8 weeks. Only patients with at least one repeat tumour measurement during therapy were considered for response analysis. Throughout the study, lesions measured at baseline were evaluated using the same technique (CT or contrast-enhanced US). Overall tumour response was scored as a complete response (CR), partial response (PR), or stable disease (SD) if the response was confirmed at least 4 weeks later. Alpha-fetoprotein (AFP) levels were measured every 8 weeks in all patients throughout the study, but changes in AFP were not an end point for assessment of response. Pain was assessed according to the NCI-CTCAE v.3.0 (http://ctep.cancer.gov/protocolDevelopment/electronic_applications/docs/ctcaev3.pdf). Statistical analyses and efficacy assessment All eligible patients who began treatment were considered assessable for the primary and secondary end points. A Simon two-stage phase II minimax design was used (Simon, 1989) to evaluate the rate of progression-free survival at 6 months. The interim analysis was performed once enrolment into the first stage was completed. In the first stage, 23 patients were observed. If two or fewer patients had progression-free survival X6 months, the trial would be terminated early for lack of efficacy. If the progression-free survival of 3 or more of the first 23 patients was equal or greater than 6 months, then an additional 18 patients would be enrolled to a maximum of 41 patients. If eight or more of the 41 had PFS of at least 6 months, we would conclude that the treatment was efficacious. This design had a Type I error rate of 5% and a Type II error rate of 10% for the null hypothesis of a 6-month PFS rate of 10% vs the alternative of 27.5%. KaplanMeier estimates of survival, PFS, and duration of response were calculated with standard errors based on Greenwood&apos;s formula. These calculations were performed using the Proc Lifetest in SAS 9.2 (SAS Institute Inc., Cary, NC, USA). RESULTS Patient recruitment and follow-up From October 2005 to July 2007, 267 patients were assessed for eligibility ( Translational Therapeutics A total of 31 patients (75.6%) had radiological evidence of disease progression at the time of enrolment as defined by comparison of baseline imaging studies, with imaging studies obtained within the previous 6 months; 34 (82.9%) patients had received therapy before enrolment, five (14.6%) of them systemic chemotherapy or sorafenib Treatment efficacy Six of the first 23 patients (26.1%) had progression-free survival X6 months, which led us to continue enrolling patients up to the preplanned total of 41 patients A total of 28 patients were evaluable for tumour response Translational Therapeutics patients without biopsy-proven disease subsequently withdrew consent after 4.9 months to undergo liver transplantation. The patient died of progression of disease 9.4 months later before undergoing liver transplantation. One patient with Child -Pugh B disease had a partial response lasting 11.7 months and died of gastrointestinal bleeding. One patient died of disease progression at 44.6 months. Overall, there were six long-term survivors with an OS greater than 24 months and four long-term survivors with an OS greater than 3 years. Importantly, five of the six (83%) long-term survivors had radiological evidence of disease progression at the time of study enrolment In all, 11 patients reported pain before treatment initiation, 3 patients reported grade 3, 5 patients reported grade 2, and 3 patients grade 1. Five patients reported complete disappearance of pain and two patients reported decreased pain shortly after treatment initiation. Two patients reported no changes and two patients reported increased pain. There were no treatment-related grade 2, 3, or 4 toxicities. The only treatment-related adverse events were grade 1 mucositis (one patient) and grade 1 somnolence (one patient) over a total of 266.8 treatment months. DISCUSSION Treatment with AM EMFs did not show any significant toxicity despite long-term treatment. The lack of toxicity experienced by the 41 patients presented in this report as well as the 28 patients from our previous report These data are comparable to recent phase II studies evaluating the effectiveness of standard chemotherapy as well as novel targeted therapies in HCC The majority of patients enrolled in this study had either failed standard treatment options or had severely impaired liver function that limited their ability to tolerate any form of systemic or intrahepatic therapy. Indeed, 16 patients (39.0%) had Child -Pugh B8 or B9 disease. Among these patients, the median progressionfree survival was 4.4 months (95% CI 1.6 -7.6 months), which is identical to that of the entire group. Five of these 16 patients (31.3%) received therapy for more than 7.5 months, which indicates that this therapy is well tolerated even in patients with severely impaired liver function. Previous treatment with standard chemotherapy or sorafenib does not seem to impact the effectiveness of AM EMFs in the treatment of HCC. Indeed, three of the four patients who had a Translational Therapeutics partial response while receiving AM EMFs had received previous systemic therapies (chemotherapy and sorafenib) and one had received intrahepatic therapy with 131 I-lipiodol. Tumour shrinkage as assessed by radiological imaging as well as changes in AFP levels were documented in patients with advanced HCC receiving RF EMF modulated at HCC-specific frequencies administered by an intrabuccal probe. Antitumour activity in patients with advanced HCC was exemplified by partial responses observed in four patients (9.8%) and decreases in AFP levels greater than 20% in four patients. A total of 18 patients (43.9%) either had objective response or SD X6 months. Importantly, this therapeutic approach has long-lasting therapeutic effects in several patients with metastatic cancer. Two of these patients, one with recurrent thyroid cancer metastatic to the lungs Our phase I/II study has several limitations. First, only 19 of the 41 patients had biopsy-proven HCC, and the others were diagnosed by clinical criteria, an approach similar to that used in a recently reported phase II trial evaluating the clinical and biological effects of bevacizumab in unresectable HCC (Siegel et al, 2008). Importantly, analysis restricted to these 19 patients shows rates of progression-free survival at 6 months, median progression-free survival and OS that are similar to those without biopsyproven HCC Antitumour response is considered the primary end point for phase II studies to proceed to further investigations. Studies applying Cox proportional hazards analysis indicate that this end point is consistently associated with survival in trials of locoregional therapies for HCC (Llovet et al, 2002) and a recent consensus article suggests that randomised studies are necessary to capture the true efficacy of novel therapies in HCC (Llovet et al, 2008a). In summary, the encouraging findings from this study warrant a randomised study to determine the impact of AM EMFs on OS and time to symptomatic progression. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS We thank Drs Al B Benson III, Northwestern University and Leonard B Saltz, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center for reviewing the manuscript. There is clinical evidence that very low and safe levels of amplitude-modulated electromagnetic fields administered via an intrabuccal spoon-shaped probe may elicit therapeutic responses in patients with cancer. However, there is no known mechanism explaining the anti-proliferative effect of very low intensity electromagnetic fields. METHODS: To understand the mechanism of this novel approach, hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) cells were exposed to 27.12 MHz radiofrequency electromagnetic fields using in vitro exposure systems designed to replicate in vivo conditions. Cancer cells were exposed to tumour-specific modulation frequencies, previously identified by biofeedback methods in patients with a diagnosis of cancer. Control modulation frequencies consisted of randomly chosen modulation frequencies within the same 100 Hz -21 kHz range as cancer-specific frequencies. RESULTS: The growth of HCC and breast cancer cells was significantly decreased by HCC-specific and breast cancer-specific modulation frequencies, respectively. However, the same frequencies did not affect proliferation of nonmalignant hepatocytes or breast epithelial cells. Inhibition of HCC cell proliferation was associated with downregulation of XCL2 and PLP2. Furthermore, HCC-specific modulation frequencies disrupted the mitotic spindle. CONCLUSION: These findings uncover a novel mechanism controlling the growth of cancer cells at specific modulation frequencies without affecting normal tissues, which may have broad implications in oncology. Conflict of interes