Molecularly targeted therapy for advanced hepatocellular carcinoma - a drug development crisis?

Hepatocellular carcinoma is the fastest growing cause of cancer related death globally. Sorafenib, a multi-targeted kinase inhibitor, is the only drug proven to improve outcomes in patients with advanced disease offering modest survival benefit. Although comprehensive genomic mapping has improved understanding of the genetic aberrations in hepatocellular cancer (HCC), this knowledge has not yet impacted clinical care. The last few years have seen the failure of several first and second line phase III clinical trials of novel molecularly targeted therapies, warranting a change in the way new therapies are investigated in HCC. Potential reasons for these failures include clinical and molecular heterogeneity, trial design and a lack of biomarkers. This review discusses the current crisis in HCC drug development and how we should learn from recent trial failures to develop a more effective personalised treatment paradigm for patients with HCC

The Relationship between Halal Logistics Practices and Organisational Competitiveness: A Study on Halal Food Industry in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

The largest and fastest-growing market in recent years is the Halal sector, which has received limited attention. The halal market is extremely competitive, and halal logistics are crucial to the growth of the halal food industry in Malaysia. The purpose of this study is to examine the relationship between Halal logistics practices and Organisational Competitiveness of Halal food industry in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Quantitative analysis performed on a survey data of 108 respondents from Halal Industry in Kuala Lumpur. The novel findings affirm that halal logistics practices, such as Halal Equipment, Halal Safety and Halal Transport Information System positively affect Organisational Competitiveness in Halal Industry in Kuala Lumpur. Managers/logisticians should aware that halal value creation in halal logistics practices have a positive effect on halal organisations competitiveness. The results draw the novel contributions of the importance of halal logistics practices to sustain halal organisational competitiveness in Malaysia.

A New Approach for Text String Detection from Natural Scenes By Grouping & Partition

In this paper we have reviewed and analyzed different methods to find strings of characters from natural scene images. We have reviewed different techniques like extraction of character string regions from scenery images based on contours and thickness of characters, efficient binarization and enhancement technique followed by a suitable connected component analysis procedure, text string detection from natural scenes by structure - based partition and grouping, and a robust algorithm for text detection in images. It is assumed that characters have closed contours, and a character string consists of characters which lie on a straight line in most cases. Therefore, by extracting closed contours and searching neighbors of them, character string regions can be extracted; Image binarization successfully processed natural scene images having shadows, non - uniform illumination, low contrast and large signal - dependent noise. Connected component analysis is used to define the final binary images that mainly consist of text regions. One technique chooses the candidate text characters from connected components by gradient feature and color feature. The text line grouping method performs Hough transform to fit text line among the centroids of text candidates. Each fitte d text line describes the orientation of a potential text string. The detected text string is presented by a rectangle region coveri ng all characters whose centroids are cascaded in its text line. To improve efficiency and accuracy, our algorithms are carried out in multi - scales. The proposed methods outperform the state - of - the - art results on the public Robust Reading Dataset, which contains text only in horizontal orientation. Furthermore, the effectiveness of our methods to detect text strings with arbitrary orientations is evaluated on the Oriented Scene Text Dataset collected by ourselves containing text strings in no horizontal orientations

Sustainable Practices of Smart Mobility Service (SMS): A Case Study of Public Transportation System in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

The public transportation system contributing immensely to national economic progress. Regardless of various obstacles, the public transportation system has achieved growth. This study aimed to examine the influences of sustainable practices of Smart Mobility Service (SMS) of public transportation system in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. The key objective this study to justify the relationship between sustainable practices such as Smart Governance (SG), Smart Infrastructure (SI), Smart Technology (ST), Smart Citizen (SC) are proposed to justify is there any significant relationships with Smart Mobility Services (SMS) in public transportation system in Kuala Lumpur. This research believes that the basis to determine the Smart Mobility Services (SMS) in public transportation system. Limitations of the study are discussed and directions for future research are suggested.

Experimental study on resilient modulus of liquid silicon dioxide (SI02) stabiuzed subgrade soil

Village and estate roads have failed to function due to damage at earlier stage of construction and this required frequent maintenance. Weak sub-grade is the basic factor of exponential damage. In order to overcome this problem, many procedures have been developed to improve the physical behavior (strength or stiffness) of the sub grade soil. One of the procedures is to incorporate a wide range of stabilizing agent, additives or conditioners. Silicon dioxide (Si02) is a water based sodium silicate which is currently being patented on application by Probase Manufacturing Sdn.Bhd. to stabilize subgrade soils. The main objective of this research is to determine the resilient modulus of the liquid Si02 stabilized sub grade soil at number of state conditions (i.e. density, moisture content and amount of stabilizer). Repeated tria"ial load test was carried out at Highway Engineering Laboratory, UTHI'v1. The specimens were prepared with ma"imum (100%), 90% and 95% dry density, optimum moisture content, 3 % dry of optimum and 3% wet of optimum, and the amount of stabilizer was 4%,8% and 12% of dry density of the soil. The specimens were cured for 0, 7, 14 and 28 days to determine the effect of curing days on the stabilized soil. The resilient modulus data were used to identify the best fit equation with the data. However typical pavement system analyzed using KENLA YER for non-linear elastic layer for fine grained soil; the equation applicable is the bilinear equation. Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) has been carried out to evaluate the level of significance effect of the state conditions on the stabilized soil. It has been found that density affects the resilient modulus of fine grained materials: however the magnitude of this effect is smaller compared to effect of moisture conditions. The addition of liquid Si02 stabilizer improves the stiffness (resilient modulus) of the soil and consequently, the optimum concentration is found to be 4% for sub grade stabilization through this study

Examining the Phenomenon of Juveniles Digital Addiction in Rural China

Digital addiction among China's rural juveniles escalates and hampers the harmony and stability of families and society. This paper investigates digital addiction among rural juveniles in China. Semi-structured interviews selected six relevant respondents in rural Shaanxi Province as samples. The study explores the degree, characteristics, causes, effects, and prevention and control of rural juveniles' digital addiction. The findings reveal the importance of digital literacy education, parent-child cognitive dislocation, and the complexity of rural juveniles' digital addiction. The study has limitations, including its limited research perspective and the need for more typical cases for analysis and discussion. Keywords: Digital addiction; Rural juveniles; Social work; Digital literacy eISSN: 2398-4287 © 2023. The Authors. Published for AMER & cE-Bs by e-International Publishing House, Ltd., UK. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/). Peer–review under responsibility of AMER (Association of Malaysian Environment-Behaviour Researchers), and cE-Bs (Centre for Environment-Behaviour Studies), College of Built Environment, Universiti Teknologi MARA, Malaysia DOI

MICROWAVE ASSISTED SYNTHESIS OF TETRAHYDROPYRMIDINE AND IN SILICO SCREENING OF ANTIDIABETIC DRUG

Objective: To detect the microwave-assisted synthesis of Tetrahydropyrimidine derivative and its molecular docking studies for Diabetes. Methods: The Bignelli condensation method was used for Tetrahydropyrimidine derivative synthesis. The docking studies made in Argus Lab software. Results: The Tetrahydropyrimidine is synthesized using the microwave. The Tetrahydropyrimidine derivative is found to be attack the insulin receptor, as it the tendency of binding with insulin receptor showed in Argus lab. Further, the good binding site of Tetrahydropyrimidine derivative with insulin receptor was predicted. Conclusion: From the research work, The Tetrahydropyrimidine derivative shows its affinity to bind with the insulin receptor. The binding value is averagely 7 which indicates it can attraction with the receptor, so it can control Diabetic mellitus by altering insulin secretion in blood plasma

Investigating the Relationship Between Moisture Content and Dry Density on Different Gradations for Road Base Granular Materials

CBR in granular materials is the key technical characteristic of layers in flexible pavement. CBR value is a way to measure the material stiffness used in the pavement design procedure for the road base layer depending on the types of aggregates. Road base layers ultimate role in the flexible pavement is to spread loading evenly over the sub-grade from the loading of vehicles throughout the road's design life. Among the factors affecting the material's bearing capacity, aggregate gradations are one of the most important parameters that give a significant result. Therefore, this study was carried to evaluate the effect of different aggregate gradations namely granite, basalt, and quartzite on bearing capacity in granular materials. To further analyze the effect of upper and lower limit gradations on the bearing capacity as base course layer, a series of aggregates physical tests and strength tests (CBR) have been conducted. The physical properties test results of the selected aggregates complied with Public Works Department (PWD) Road Work Specifications (2008) as specified and for the strength test. California Bearing Ratio (CBR) under controlled density and moisture for soaked and un-soaked conditions were performed.  For both soaked and un-soaked conditions, the samples with lower limit gradations showed higher stress values compared to upper limit gradations for all three types of aggregates. Granite showed higher CBR values for both, soaked, and un-soaked conditions, followed by basalt and quartzite at upper and lower limit gradation. Un-soaked granite samples with lower limit gradation showed 60.5% increment in strength compared to un-soaked upper limit gradation, followed by quartzite 53.6% and basalt 9.94% respectively. The results indicated that strength is highest in the lower limit gradations where the use of coarse-grained aggregates could significantly increase the strengt