Can an Amino Acid Mixture Alleviate Gastrointestinal Symptoms in Neuroendocrine Tumor Patients?

Background: Neuroendocrine tumors, although relatively rare in incidence, are now the second most prevalent gastrointestinal neoplasm owing to indolent disease biology. A small but significant sub-group of neuroendocrine tumor patients suffer from diarrhea. This is usually secondary to carcinoid syndrome but can also be a result of short gut syndrome, bile acid excess or iatrogenic etiologies. Recently, an amino acid based oral rehydration solution (enterade® Advanced Oncology Formula) was found to have anti-diarrheal properties in preclinical models. Methods: A retrospective chart review of all NET patients treated with enterade® AO was performed after IRB approval. Results: Ninety-eight NET patients who had received enterade® AO at our clinic from May 2017 through June 2019 were included. Patients (N = 49 of 98) with follow up data on bowel movements (BMs) were included for final analysis. Eighty-four percent of patients (41/49) had fewer BMs after taking enterade® AO and 66% (27/41) reported more than 50% reduction in BM frequency. The mean number of daily BMs was 6.6 (range, 3–20) at baseline before initiation of therapy, while the mean number of BMs at 1 week time point post enterade® AO was 2.9 (range, 0–11). Conclusions: Our retrospective observations are encouraging and support prospective validation with appropriate controls in NET patients. This is first published report of the potential anti-diarrheal activity of enterade® AO in NET patients

Synthetic Biology Open Language (SBOL) Version 2.3

Synthetic biology builds upon the techniques and successes of genetics, molecular biology, and metabolic engineering by applying engineering principles to the design of biological systems. The field still faces substantial challenges, including long development times, high rates of failure, and poor reproducibility. One method to ameliorate these problems is to improve the exchange of information about designed systems between laboratories. The synthetic biology open language (SBOL) has been developed as a standard to support the specification and exchange of biological design information in synthetic biology, filling a need not satisfied by other pre-existing standards. This document details version 2.3.0 of SBOL, which builds upon version 2.2.0 published in last year’s JIB Standards in Systems Biology special issue. In particular, SBOL 2.3.0 includes means of succinctly representing sequence modifications, such as insertion, deletion, and replacement, an extension to support organization and attachment of experimental data derived from designs, and an extension for describing numerical parameters of design elements. The new version also includes specifying types of synthetic biology activities, unambiguous locations for sequences with multiple encodings, refinement of a number of validation rules, improved figures and examples, and clarification on a number of issues related to the use of external ontology terms