Bis[aqua­(2,3-naphtho-15-crown-5)sodium] tetra­kis(thio­cyanato-κN)cobaltate(II)

The title complex, [Na(C18H22O5)(H2O)]2[Co(NCS)4], consists of two aqua­(2,3-naphtho-15-crown-5)sodium complex cations and one [Co(NCS)4]2− complex anion, which has crystallographic symmetry. In the anion, the CoII centre is coordinated by the N atoms of four NCS− ligands in a distorted tetra­hedral geometry. In the complex cations, the NaI centre is coordinated by five O atoms of the 2,3-naphtho-15-crown-5 ligand and one water O atom. The complex mol­ecules form a two-dimensional network via weak O—H⋯S inter­actions between adjacent cations and anion

catena-Poly[[nickel(II)-μ3-1,1-dicyano­ethene-2,2-dithiol­ato-κ4 S,S′:N:N′-bis­[(15-crown-5)magnesium(II)]-μ3-1,1-dicyano­ethene-2,2-dithiol­ato-κ4 N:N′:S,S′] dichloride]

The reaction of MgCl2, NiCl2, and Na2(i-mnt) (i-mnt is 1,1-dicyano­thene-2,2-dithiol­ate) with 15-crown-5 (15-C-5) leads to an infinite chain polymer, {[NiMg2(C4N2S2)2(C10H20O5)2]Cl2}n or {[Mg(15-C-5)]2[Ni(i-mnt)2]Cl2}n, which consists of two [Mg(15-C-5)]2+ complex cations, one [Ni(i-mnt)2]2− complex anion and two Cl− ions per formula unit. In the [Ni(i-mnt)2]2− complex anion, Ni2+ is located on a crystallographic mirror plane with a slightly distorted square-planar coordination by four S atoms. In the [Mg(15-C-5)]2+ complex cations, the Mg and one O atom of the crown lie on mirror planes and the Mg atoms are in sevenfold coordination environments of five O atoms from the crown and two N atoms from two i-mnt anions. The bridging of the two complexes via the Mg—N bonds leads to the formation of one-dimensional chains along the a axis

(Pyridino-15-crown-5-κ5 N,O,O′,O′′,O′′′)bis­(thio­cyanato-κN)manganese(II)

The title complex, [Mn(NCS)2(C13H19NO4)] {systematic name: [3,6,9,12-tetra­oxa-18-aza­bicyclo­[12.3.1]octa­cosa-14(18),15,17-triene-κ5 N,O,O′,O′′,O′′′]bis­(thio­cyanato-κN)manganese(I­I)}, was obtained by the reaction of MnCl2·4H2O and NaSCN with pyridino-15-crown-5. The Mn2+ center has a distorted penta­gonal bipyramidal coordination geometry, coordinated by four O atoms and one N atom of the pyridino-15-crown-5 mol­ecule, and by the N atoms of the two NCS− ligands

Non-linear relationship between baseline fasting blood glucose and mortality in peritoneal dialysis patients, a retrospective cohort study

BackgroundThe relationship between baseline fasting blood glucose (bFBG) and mortality in peritoneal dialysis (PD) patients has been the subject of debate, with limited exploration of the non-linear relationship between bFBG and death in these patients.MethodsThis retrospective study categorized patients into four groups based on their bFBG using quartiles. Baseline clinical data at the initiation of dialysis were compared. Survival curves were plotted, and subgroup analyses were stratified by relevant covariates. To address the non-linear relationship, curve fitting and a threshold effect analysis were performed.ResultsThe study included 379 PD patients with a median follow-up of 41.8 (22.6, 60.1) months. The COX proportional hazards model showed an association between bFBG and the risk of death after adjusting for confounding factors [hazard ratio (HR): 1.22, 95% CI: 1.05−1.41, P = 0.009]. Stratified analyses indicated a stable correlation between bFBG and mortality. The Kaplan-Meier curve analysis revealed significant differences in survival rates among different groups based on bFBG levels (P < 0.01). The curve fitting analysis revealed a U-shaped relationship between bFBG and mortality, with an inflection point at approximately 5.1 mmol/L.ConclusionOur study has demonstrated a non-linear relationship between bFBG and mortality in PD patients. Additionally, we have found that the optimal bFBG value associated with the lowest risk of mortality is approximately 5.1 mmol/L

Cognitive impairment in Chinese adult patients with type III spinal muscular atrophy without disease-modifying treatment

ObjectiveSpinal muscular atrophy (SMA) is a neurodegenerative disorder characterized by the degeneration of motor neurons in the spinal cord. It remains uncertain whether the cognitive performance of adult patients with SMA is impaired. The objective of this study was to assess the cognitive profile of adult Chinese patients with SMA and the association between clinical features and cognitive ability, particularly executive function.MethodsThis cross-sectional study included 22 untreated adult patients with type III SMA and 20 healthy subjects. The following variables were assessed: general intelligence, memory, attention, language, executive function, depression, anxiety, and other demographic and clinical parameters. In addition, physical function was evaluated using the Hammersmith Functional Motor Scale Expanded (HFMSE), the Revised Upper Limb Module (RULM), and the 6-Minute Walk Test (6MWT).ResultsSMA patients had lower scores than healthy subjects in the Verbal Fluency Test, Stroop effect, Total Errors, Perseverative Responses, Perseverative Errors, and Non-perseverative Errors in the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test, showing impaired abilities of SMA patients in executive function. In the Attention Network Test (ANT), the results indicated that the SMA patients also had selective deficits in their executive control networks. Ambulant patients had better executive function test performance than non-ambulant ones. Compromised executive abilities in patients with SMA were correlated with a younger age at onset, poorer motor function, and higher levels of anxiety and depression.ConclusionOur study presented the distribution of cognitive impairment in a Chinese cohort with SMA. Patients with type III SMA showed selective deficits in executive function, which may be associated with disease severity, physical impairment, depression and anxiety. Future cognitive studies, accounting for motor and emotional impairment, are needed to evaluate if executive impairment is driven by specific brain changes or by those confounding factors

The investigation of mechanical and thermal properties of super-hydrophobic nitinol surfaces fabricated by hybrid methods of laser irradiation and carbon ion implantation

Comparing with laser irradiation only, the laser ablation combined with chemical modification process is a widely used technique to obtain bio-inspired super-hydrophobic surface. However, the as-prepared surfaces may be polluted by toxic substance during chemical modification such as fluoroalkyl silane and stearic acid. The side effect of polluted functional surface on organisms and environment limited its application value. In this paper, a green and environmental-friendly super-hydrophobic surface was quickly fabricated on nitinol substrates through hybrid of nanosecond laser ablation and carbon ion implantation. The time that turning from super-hydrophilicity to super-hydrophobicity was only 16 hours exhibiting high efficiency compared with pure laser processing. Surface morphology and chemical component were systematically investigated to reveal the formation mechanism of super-hydrophobicity in such short time. The mechanical abrasion tests implied that the mechanical properties of surface microstructure could be heightened after carbon ion implantation, showing the superior structure stability. It is noted that chemical modified super-hydrophobicity could be hardly destroyed under high temperature, and the thermal stability of this ion implanted super-hydrophobic surface was on a par with it. This hybrid method of laser irradiation and carbon ion implantation paves a green way for rapid fabrication super-hydrophobic surface on nitinol, which would have great application value in biomedicine and industry

Case Report: Unedited allogeneic chimeric antigen receptor T cell bridging to conditioning-free hematopoietic stem cell transplantation for a child with refractory Burkitt lymphoma

PurposeBurkitt lymphoma (BL) is the most common tumor of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma (NHL) in children, accounting for about 40% of cases. Although different combined short-course chemotherapies have achieved a good effect, refractory/relapsed BL has a poor prognosis with cure rates less than 30%. Chimeric antigen receptor T cell (CAR-T) therapy has developed rapidly in recent years and achieved excellent results in acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL). However, in some cases, there is a failure to produce autologous CAR-T cells because of T-cell dysfunction. In such cases, allogeneic CAR-T therapy has to be considered.MethodsA 17-year-old boy with stage II BL did not respond to extensive chemotherapy and sequential autologous CAR-T therapy. Lentiviral vectors containing anti-CD20-BB-ζ (20CAR) and anti-CD22-BB-ζ (22CAR) transgenes were used to modify the T cells from an HLA-identical matched unrelated donor. Flow cytometry was used to assess the cytokine analyses and CAR-T cell persistence in peripheral blood, enumerated by qPCR as copies per ug DNA. Informed consent for autologous/allogeneic CAR-T therapy was obtained from the patient and his legal guardian.ResultsUnedited HLA-matched allogeneic CD20 and CD22 CAR-T cells were infused after lymphodepletion chemotherapy with cyclophosphamide and fludarabine. The patient experienced Grade IV cytokine release syndrome (CRS) and went into complete remission (CR) after anti-inflammatory treatment including tocilizumab. Because of persistent pancytopenia and full donor chimerism, the same donor’s conditioning-free peripheral blood stem cells were successfully transplanted 55 days post CAR-T. Neutrophils were engrafted at day +11 and platelets were rebuilt at day +47 without obvious acute graft-versus-host disease (GVHD), but there was mild chronic GVHD in the skin and eyes. Currently, active anti-rejection therapy is still underway.ConclusionUnedited HLA-matched allogeneic CAR-T cell therapy could be an innovative, effective, and safe treatment for children with refractory/relapse BL without obvious acute GVHD. Conditioning-free allogeneic hematopoietic stem cell transplantation (HSCT) from the same donor is feasible for a patient with full donor T-cell chimerism after allogeneic CAR-T. It cannot be ignored that close GVHD monitoring is needed post HSCT

A novel approach for automatic segmentation of prostate and its lesion regions on magnetic resonance imaging

ObjectiveTo develop an accurate and automatic segmentation model based on convolution neural network to segment the prostate and its lesion regions.MethodsOf all 180 subjects, 122 healthy individuals and 58 patients with prostate cancer were included. For each subject, all slices of the prostate were comprised in the DWIs. A novel DCNN is proposed to automatically segment the prostate and its lesion regions. This model is inspired by the U-Net model with the encoding-decoding path as the backbone, importing dense block, attention mechanism techniques, and group norm-Atrous Spatial Pyramidal Pooling. Data augmentation was used to avoid overfitting in training. In the experimental phase, the data set was randomly divided into a training (70%), testing set (30%). four-fold cross-validation methods were used to obtain results for each metric.ResultsThe proposed model achieved in terms of Iou, Dice score, accuracy, sensitivity, 95% Hausdorff Distance, 86.82%,93.90%, 94.11%, 93.8%,7.84 for the prostate, 79.2%, 89.51%, 88.43%,89.31%,8.39 for lesion region in segmentation. Compared to the state-of-the-art models, FCN, U-Net, U-Net++, and ResU-Net, the segmentation model achieved more promising results.ConclusionThe proposed model yielded excellent performance in accurate and automatic segmentation of the prostate and lesion regions, revealing that the novel deep convolutional neural network could be used in clinical disease treatment and diagnosis

A high interferon gamma signature of CD8+ T cells predicts response to neoadjuvant immunotherapy plus chemotherapy in gastric cancer

BackgroundWhile the tumor microenvironment (TME) affects immune checkpoint blockade (ICB) efficacy, ICB also reshapes the characteristics of TME. Thus far, studies have focused on the TME evolution during neoadjuvant or adjuvant ICB therapy in gastric cancer (GC). However, the interaction between TME characteristics and neoadjuvant immunotherapy plus chemotherapy remains to be elucidated.MethodsWe performed single-cell RNA sequencing on ten GC specimens pre- and post-neoadjuvant camrelizumab plus mFOLFOX6 to determine the impact of the TME on the efficacy of the combination therapy and the remodeling of TME by the therapy.ResultsA high baseline interferon gamma (IFN-γ) signature in CD8+ T cells predicts better responses to the combination therapy. We also observed that the IFN-γ signature significantly decreased in multiple cell types, and the exhausted signature of CD8+ T cells was significantly suppressed during the neoadjuvant therapy.ConclusionsOur data reveal interactions between the TME and neoadjuvant immunotherapy plus chemotherapy in GC. Importantly, it also highlights the signature of CD8+ T cells in predicting response to the combination therapy in GC

Molecular dynamics studies of ultrafast laser-induced phase and structural change in crystalline silicon

In this work, thermodynamic phenomena in crystalline silicon irradiated by an ultrafast laser pulse were studied using the method of molecular dynamics simulations. The Stillinger-Weber potential was used to model the crystalline silicon. The temperature development in silicon when heated by an ultrafast laser pulse was tracked. Melting and resolidification processes and the resulting structural change were investigated. Radial Distribution Functions were used to track the liquid-amorphous interface during resolidification. It was found that the temperature at the solid-liquid interface could deviate from the equilibrium melting temperature by several hundred degrees. After the melted layer was solidified, some melted material became crystalline and the rest of the material remained in an amorphous state. The difference in the final state was associated with the rate of resolidification and both of the qualitative and quantitative analyses of the relationship between the final atom structure and resolidification rate were made. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved