Inhibition of EGFR-AKT axis results in the suppression of ovarian tumors in vitro and in preclinical mouse model

Ovarian cancer is the leading cause of cancer related deaths in women. Genetic alterations including overexpression of EGFR play a crucial role in ovarian carcinogenesis. Here we evaluated the effect of phenethyl isothiocyanate (PEITC) in ovarian tumor cells in vitro and in vivo. Oral administration of 12 μmol PEITC resulted in drastically suppressing ovarian tumor growth in a preclinical mouse model. Our in vitro studies demonstrated that PEITC suppress the growth of SKOV-3, OVCAR-3 and TOV-21G human ovarian cancer cells by inducing apoptosis in a concentration-dependent manner. Growth inhibitory effects of PEITC were mediated by inhibition of EGFR and AKT, which are known to be overexpressed in ovarian tumors. PEITC treatment caused significant down regulation of constitutive protein levels as well as phosphorylation of EGFR at Tyr1068 in various ovarian cancer cells. In addition, PEITC treatment drastically reduced the phosphorylation of AKT which is downstream to EGFR and disrupted mTOR signaling. PEITC treatment also inhibited the kinase activity of AKT as observed by the down regulation of p-GSK in OVCAR-3 and TOV-21G cells. AKT overexpression or TGF treatment blocked PEITC induced apoptosis in ovarian cancer cells. These results suggest that PEITC targets EGFR/AKT pathway in our model. In conclusion, our study suggests that PEITC could be used alone or in combination with other therapeutic agents to treat ovarian cancer. © 2012 Loganathan et al

Development of Paver Block by Using Foundry Sand Based Geopolymer Concrete

Foundry sand is high quality silica sand with uniform physical characteristics. It is a byproduct of ferrous and nonferrous metal casting industries, where sand has been used for centuries as a molding material because of its thermal conductivity. Applications of foundry sand in Geopolymer Paver block, which is technically, sound, environmentally safe for sustainable development. In this study, partially replacement of fine aggregate in Geopolymer paver block by used foundry sand for determining the change in the compressive strength of paver blocks and cost of paver block. Partial replacement of fine aggregate in different percentage as like 0%, 20%, 40%, 60%,80% and 100%. The compressive strength has been determined at the end of 7, 14 and 28 days and water absorption test has been determined at 28 days

AN ELEVATED PULSE PRESSURE: A MAJOR RISK FACTOR FOR CARDIOVASCULAR DISEASES

Pulse pressure (PP) is a predictor and major risk factor for cardiovascular (CV) diseases as left ventricular hypertrophy, myocardial infarction, carotid hypertrophy, atherosclerosis, congestive heart failure and stroke as well as chronic renal failure progression. PP has been proved a strong forecaster of CV risk, particularly when it is higher than 60 mm Hg and more strongly relates to carotid hypertrophy and extent of atherosclerosis than systolic pressure. Isolated systolic hypertension (ISH) is common among the elderly and is accompanied by elevated pulse pressure. However, treatment of ISH may further raise the PP if diastolic pressure is lowered to a greater extent than systolic pressure. Several drugs for hypertension have the side effect of increasing resting PP irreversibly, other antihypertensive drugs, such as ACE inhibitors, have been shown to lower the PP. Various approaches made by researchers for the maintenance of normal PP to reduce the mortality caused due to CV events based on the abnormal PP. We briefly review the therapeutic consequences for the attenuation of elevated PP associated with various CV eventsKEYWORDSPulse pressure, Cardiovascular diseases, Arterial stiffness, Antihypertensive therap

Stability Analysis of Integrated Pest Management with Impulsive Biological Control

The aim of the present work is to study the dynamics of stage-structured pest control model including biological control, i.e. by releasing of natural enemies and infected pests periodically. It is assumed that only immature susceptible pests are attacked by natural enemies admitting Beddington DeAngelis functional response and mature susceptible pests are contacted by infected pests with bilinear incidence rate and become exposed. The sufficient condition for local stability of pest extinction periodic solution is derived by making use of Floquet’s theory and small amplitude perturbation technique. The global attractivity of pest extinction periodic solution is also established by applying comparison principle of impulsive differential equations

Effect of Fibonacci Modulation On Superconductivity

We have studied finite-sized single band models with short range pairing interactions between electrons in presence of diagonal Fibonacci modulation in one dimension. Two models, namely the attractive Hubbard model and the Penson-Kolb model, have been investigated at half-filling at zero temperature by solving the Bogoliubov-de Gennes equations in real space within a mean field approximation. The competition between ``disorder'' and the pairing interaction leads to a suppression of superconductivity (of usual pairs with zero centre-of-mass momenta) in the strong-coupling limit while an enhancement of the pairing correlation is observed in the weak-coupling regime for both the models. However, the dissimilarity of the pairing mechanisms in these two models brings about notable difference in the results. The extent to which the bond ordered wave and the $\eta$-paired (of pairs with centre-of-mass momenta = $\pi$) phases of the Penson-Kolb model are affected by the disorder has also been studied in the present calculation. Some finite size effects are also identified.Comment: 14 pages, 13 figure

Breast Tumor Recognition by Semantic Segmentation of Multiclass Ultrasound Images

Objectives: The main purpose of this paper is to suggest a semantic segmentation model to reduce training time in ultrasound breast cancer images. This is achieved by employing a smaller network with fewer trainable parameters, resulting in faster training while maintaining maximum accuracy. Methods: This paper proposes a modified U-Net model, which we call the V model, for the subdivision of breast tumors. The proposed V architecture is applied explicitly to ultrasound breast cancer datasets for semantic segmentation. Our proposed model achieves semantic segmentation by employing an encoder and decoder on real and mask image datasets. Findings: Therefore, developing a proposed system, namely a V-Net computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) system, is imperative. This CAD system aims to minimize human errors while enhancing accuracy and speed in the premature finding of breast tumors. The proposed model utilizes minimal layers and parameters while maintaining superior results regarding correctness, speed, and computational proficiency. Novelty: The proposed V-net model applies to analysing any medical image for detecting disease and finding more accuracy than other U-net models

Preserving Privacy In Image Database Through Bit-planes Obfuscation

The recent surge in computer vision applications has caused visual privacy concerns to people who are either users or exposed to an underlying surveillance system. To preserve their privacy, image obfuscation lays out a strong road through which the usability of images can also be maintained without revealing any visual private information. However, prior solutions are susceptible to reconstruction attacks or produce non-trainable images even by leveraging the obfuscation ways. This paper proposes a novel bit-planes-based image obfuscation scheme, called Bimof, to protect the visual privacy of the user in the images that are input into a recognition-based system. By incorporating the chaotic system for non-invertible noise with matrix decomposition, Bimof offers strong security and usability for creating a secure image database. In Bimof, it is hard for an adversary to recover the original image, withstanding a malicious server. We conduct experiments on two standard activity recognition datasets, UCF101 and HMDB51, to validate the effectiveness and usability of our scheme. We provide a rigorous quantitative security analysis through pixel frequency attacks and differential analysis to support our findings

Expression and Characterization of Chandipura Virus Proteins

Chandipura virus (CHPV) has recently emerged as an extremely lethal human pathogen in the family Rhabdoviridae and is linked to significant encephalitis outbreaks in different parts of India. The biology of CHPV remains less studied to date and the availability of reagents such as purified proteins can enhance research in this direction. In this study, we have overexpressed four of the CHPV proteins namely Nucleoprotein (N), Phosphoprotein (P), Matrix protein (M) and Glycoprotein (G) using three  distinct tags in bacterial system and with changes in inducer concentration, growth and solubilisation conditions successfully purified M and G proteins for the first time along with N and P. Furthermore, the interactions of CHPV M protein with other viral proteins (G, N and P) was investigated using ELISA and GST pull down assays to show the utility of olubilised proteins. The results of both the assays demonstrated that M protein interacts with both G and N proteins, while it does not interact with P protein, in a similar  manner as reported for Vesicular Stomatitis Virus