Is the proteome of bronchoalveolar lavage extracellular vesicles a marker of advanced lung cancer?

Acellular bronchoalveolar lavage (BAL) proteomics can partially separate lung cancer from non-lung cancer patients based on principal component analysis and multivariate analysis. Furthermore, the variance in the proteomics data sets is correlated mainly with lung cancer status and, to a lesser extent, smoking status and gender. Despite these advances BAL small and large extracellular vehicles (EVs) proteomes reveal aberrant protein expression in paracrine signaling mechanisms in cancer initiation and progression. We consequently present a case-control study of 24 bronchoalveolar lavage extracellular vesicle samples which were analyzed by state-of-the-art liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry (LC-MS). We obtained evidence that BAL EVs proteome complexity correlated with lung cancer stage 4 and mortality within two years´ follow-up (p value = 0.006). The potential therapeutic target DNMT3B complex is significantly up-regulated in tumor tissue and BAL EVs. The computational analysis of the immune and fibroblast cell markers in EVs suggests that patients who deceased within the follow-up period display higher marker expression indicative of innate immune and fibroblast cells (four out of five cases). This study provides insights into the proteome content of BAL EVs and their correlation to clinical outcomes.R.M. is supported by Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (CEEC position, 2019–2025 investigator). This article is a result of the projects (iNOVA4Health—UID/Multi/04462/2013), supported by Lisboa Portugal Regional Operational Programme (Lisboa2020), under the PORTUGAL 2020 Partnership Agreement, through the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF). This work is also funded by FEDER funds through the COMPETE 2020 Programme and National Funds through FCT—Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology under the projects number PTDC/BTM-TEC/30087/2017 and PTDC/BTM-TEC/30088/2017. This work was supported by the Wellcome Trust/DBT India Alliance Margdarshi Fellowship (grant number IA/M/15/1/502023) awarded to A.P. B.C.-S., M.C.S.C. and C.B. are supported by the Champalimaud Foundation and the EMBO Installation Grant 3921

The state of play of blockchain technology in the financial services sector: A systematic literature review

The modern trends of digitalization have completely transformed and reshaped business practices, whole businesses, and even a number of industries. Blockchain technology is believed to be the latest advancement in industries such as the financial sector, where trust is of prime significance. Blockchain technology is a decentralized and coded security system which provides the capability for new digital services and platforms to be created through this emerging technology. This research presents a systematic review of scholarly articles on blockchain technology in the financial sector. We commenced by considering 227 articles and subsequently filtered this list down to 87 articles. From this, we present a classification framework that has three dimensions: blockchain-enabled financial benefits, challenges, and functionality. This research identifies implications for future research and practice within the blockchain paradigm

Women’s entrepreneurship policy research : a 30-year review of the evidence

This paper focuses on women’s entrepreneurship policy as a core component of the entrepreneurial ecosystem. We use a systematic literature review (SLR) approach to critically explore the policy implications of women’s entrepreneurship research according to gender perspective: feminist empiricism, feminist standpoint theory, and post-structuralist feminist theory. Our research question asks whether there is a link between the nature of policy implications and the different theoretical perspectives adopted, and whether scholars’ policy implications have changed as the field of women’s entrepreneurship research has developed. We concentrate on empirical studies published in the “Big Five” primary entrepreneurship research journals (SBE, ETP, JBV, JSBM, and ERD) over a period of more than 30 years (1983–2015). We find that policy implications from women’s entrepreneurship research are mostly vague, conservative, and center on identifying skills gaps in women entrepreneurs that need to be “fixed,” thus isolating and individualizing any perceived problem. Despite an increase in the number of articles offering policy implications, we find little variance in the types of policy implications being offered by scholars, regardless of the particular theoretical perspective adopted, and no notable change over our 30-year review period. Recommendations to improve the entrepreneurial ecosystem for women from a policy perspective are offered, and avenues for future research are identified

Managerial challenges of Industry 4.0: an empirically backed research agenda for a nascent field

The increasing intelligence of products and systems, their intra-company cross-linking and their cross-company integration into value creation networks is referred to as Industry 4.0. Academics and practitioners, largely agreeing on the global importance of this proclaimed industrial revolution, have published many contributions on the topic. Research, however, is rather focused on investigating single technologies in quite specific application domains and largely neglects the profound managerial challenges underlying Industry 4.0. Given the recent plea for a more active contribution from the management science community, we strive to establish Industry 4.0 as a challenging but promising field for management research, and aim to assist scholars in engaging with the topic. Therefore, we first gather and analyze extant contributions by means of a systematic literature review and synthesize the information gained into 18 managerial challenges of Industry 4.0 falling into six interrelated clusters: (1) strategy and analysis, (2) planning and implementation, (3) cooperation and networks, (4) business models, (5) human resources and (6) change and leadership. Considering that Industry 4.0 is still an emerging topic and publications may therefore not always be found in highly ranked journals, we aimed to increase the confidence in our findings and triangulated our data by conducting an online survey of industry experts and academics that allows us to qualify the identified challenges in terms of importance and future research need. On this basis, we present an empirically backed research agenda and suggest fruitful avenues for future research in three basic categories: practice-enhancing research, knowledge-enhancing research, and high-impact research

The Relationship Between Firm Resilience to Supply Chain Disruptions and Firm Innovation

ThisFirm resiliencechapter discusses theSupply chain disruptions relationship betweenInnovationsupply chainSupply chaindisruption risk managementDisruption risk management and innovationInnovation management and examines whether a firm’s investment in innovationInnovation can improve the firm’s resilienceResilience to supply chainSupply chain disruption. We review the antecedents of both firm innovativeness and firm resilienceFirm resilience to supply chain disruptionsSupply chain disruptions, and we identify how investment in innovationInnovation can enhance a firm’s response to supply chain disruptionsSupply chain disruptions using a systematic literature review process. We identify leadershipLeadership, information sharing, and collaboration as practices that improve both firm innovationInnovation and firm resilienceFirm resilience to supply chainSupply chain disruption. We discuss future research directions to further examine the relationship between a firm’s innovationInnovation capability and the firm’s resilienceResilience to supply chain disruptionsSupply chain disruptions