A study on the efficacy and tolerability of Chinese traditional medicine using herbal patches in smoking cessation

Cigarette smoking is a major public health issue in both developed and developing countries. There is estimated to be over a billion smokers in the world today, with almost one third of them living in China. In China, during the mid-1990s there were between 500,000 - 700,000 annual tobacco-related deaths. This predicted number of deaths could rise to nearly three million people a year by 2050. Many smokers in China want to quit, but Nicotine Replacement Therapy (NRT) is expensive in the East as the standard of living in China is a great deal lower than that in the West. The treatment costs more and the duration IS about 4-6 weeks. Zhong Mai Yan Kе (Joymain Nicofree) - a Chinese herbal preparation for smoking cessation was produced in 1997 in China. It is claimed that Zhong Mai Yan Kе is effective but the claim has not been verified. In this study, the effectiveness of Zhong Mai Yan Kе was tested. Research Design Method: Open Randomised Controlled Trial (RCT). Sample: 64 volunteers were recruited based on a set of inclusion and exclusion criteria. 50 and 14 volunteers were allocated randomly to the treatment group and the control group. Intervention: Zhong Mai Yan Kе was given to the treatment group whereas the control group was given a placebo. Location: Dalian city in China. Results: 49 in the treatment group and 14 in the control group completed the study. The initial results at the end of the 9- day treatment were 51.0% (n=25) managed to stop smoking; 34.7% (n=17) managed to reduce smoking consumption and 14.3% (n=7) failed to quit smoking. None (100%) in the control group managed to stop or reduce smoking consumption. Only few people in the treatment group suffered from side effects, such as nausea and dizziness. The follow-up results 3 months after the treatment were 43% (21 out of the 25 quitters) managed to be ex-smokers; 38.8% (n=19) managed to reduce smoking consumption and 18.4% (n=9) failed to quit smoking. None (100%) in the control group managed to stop or reduce smoking consumption. No one suffered from any side effects 3 months after the trial. Conclusion Zhong Mai Yan Kе is an effective agent for smoking cessation. The findings of the present study suggest that Zhong Mai Yan Kе could be effective non-nicotine based herbal medicine for smoking cessation for worldwide use subject to further validation by other researchers

Genistein increases epidermal growth factor receptor signaling and promotes tumor progression in advanced human prostate cancer.

Genistein is an isoflavone found in soy, and its chemo-preventive and -therapeutic effects have been well established from in vitro studies. Recently, however, its therapeutic actions in vivo have been questioned due to contradictory reports from animal studies, which rely on rodent models or implantation of cell lines into animals. To clarify in vivo effects of genistein in advanced prostate cancer patients, we developed a patient-derived prostate cancer xenograft model, in which a clinical prostatectomy sample was grafted into immune deficient mice. Our results showed an increased lymph node (LN) and secondary organ metastases in genistein-treated mice compared to untreated controls. Interestingly, invasive malignant cells aggregated to form islands/micrometastasis only in the secondary organs of the genistein-treated groups, not in the untreated control group. To understand the underlying mechanism for metastatic progression, we examined cell proliferation and apoptosis on paraffin-sections. Immunohistological data show that tumors of genistein-treated groups have more proliferating and fewer apoptotic cancer cells than those of the untreated group. Our immunoblotting data suggest that increased proliferation and metastasis are linked to enhanced activities of tyrosine kinases, EGFR and its downstream Src, in genistein-treated groups. Despite the chemopreventive effects proposed by earlier in vitro studies, the cancer promoting effect of genistein observed here suggests the need for careful selection of patients and safer planning of clinical trials

Thermochemical conversion of biomass: Potential future prospects

The thermochemical conversion of biomass is potentially vital to meeting global demand for sustainable transport fuels so besides combustion; torrefaction, liquefaction, pyrolysis and gasification are reviewed. The merits and demerits of these processes and examples of industrial applications are evaluated, and two promising avenues for future development are identified. The future of biomass upgrading via thermochemical processing will depend on sector coupling, both within the energy sector and with sectors such as food production. Owing to environmental constraints and the need to maintain food production, the availability of traditional feedstocks for biofuels, such as corn, will be limited in the future. Now given the ambitious targets for sustainable aviation fuel – a higher quality fuel – reserving appropriate feedstocks for aviation fuel will be necessary. Such a policy would open opportunities for the commercial development of the sustainable production of such liquid fuels via liquefaction and pyrolysis. The second avenue of opportunity links to the fact that biomass in the form of wooden pellets has established itself as an essential fuel. In the UK and elsewhere, it is already contributing to the decarbonisation of the electricity grids. So worldwide, a positive future for biomass combustion, aided where appropriate by torrefaction, is envisaged as increasingly crucial for the abatement of greenhouse gas emissions. Alongside battery storage and pumped hydroelectric storage, the contribution of biomass processes, such as torrefaction, to tackling the storage problem arising from the intermittent nature of wind and solar energy has been clarified for the first time

WordSup: Exploiting Word Annotations for Character based Text Detection

Imagery texts are usually organized as a hierarchy of several visual elements, i.e. characters, words, text lines and text blocks. Among these elements, character is the most basic one for various languages such as Western, Chinese, Japanese, mathematical expression and etc. It is natural and convenient to construct a common text detection engine based on character detectors. However, training character detectors requires a vast of location annotated characters, which are expensive to obtain. Actually, the existing real text datasets are mostly annotated in word or line level. To remedy this dilemma, we propose a weakly supervised framework that can utilize word annotations, either in tight quadrangles or the more loose bounding boxes, for character detector training. When applied in scene text detection, we are thus able to train a robust character detector by exploiting word annotations in the rich large-scale real scene text datasets, e.g. ICDAR15 and COCO-text. The character detector acts as a key role in the pipeline of our text detection engine. It achieves the state-of-the-art performance on several challenging scene text detection benchmarks. We also demonstrate the flexibility of our pipeline by various scenarios, including deformed text detection and math expression recognition.Comment: 2017 International Conference on Computer Visio

Optimization Study of Combination Energy-Saving Measure for Mechanical Oil Production Well

In this paper, Fibonacci optimization-searching method and Golden section method are applied for optimization of combination energy-saving measure. And technology evaluating for several main energy-saving equipment and combination installations is made. The optimal energy-saving installation is determined by using the method established

Spectroscopic localization of atomic sample plane for precise digital holography

In digital holography, the coherent scattered light fields can be reconstructed volumetrically. By refocusing the fields to the sample planes, absorption and phase-shift profiles of sparsely distributed samples can be simultaneously inferred in 3D. This holographic advantage is highly useful for spectroscopic imaging of cold atomic samples. However, unlike {\it e.g.} biological samples or solid particles, the quasi-thermal atomic gases under laser-cooling are typically featureless without sharp boundaries, invalidating a class of standard numerical refocusing methods. Here, we extend the refocusing protocol based on the Gouy phase anomaly for small phase objects to free atomic samples. With a prior knowledge on a coherent spectral phase angle relation for cold atoms that is robust against probe condition variations, an ``out-of-phase'' response of the atomic sample can be reliably identified, which flips the sign during the numeric back-propagation across the sample plane to serve as the refocus criterion. Experimentally, we determine the sample plane of a laser-cooled $^{39}$K gas released from a microscopic dipole trap, with a $\delta z\approx 1~{\rm \mu m}$$\ll 2\lambda_p/{\rm NA}^2$ axial resolution, with a NA=0.3 holographic microscope at $\lambda_p=770~$nm probe wavelength.Comment: 18 pages, 7 figures, substantial revision with a few mistakes fixe

Enhanced anticancer activity of a combination of docetaxel and Aneustat (OMN54) in a patient-derived, advanced prostate cancer tissue xenograft model.

The current first-line treatment for advanced metastatic prostate cancer, i.e. docetaxel-based therapy, is only marginally effective. The aim of the present study was to determine whether such therapy can be improved by combining docetaxel with Aneustat (OMN54), a multivalent botanical drug candidate shown to have anti-prostate cancer activity in preliminary in vitro experiments, which is currently undergoing a Phase-I Clinical Trial. Human metastatic, androgen-independent C4-2 prostate cancer cells and NOD-SCID mice bearing PTEN-deficient, metastatic and PSA-secreting, patient-derived subrenal capsule LTL-313H prostate cancer tissue xenografts were treated with docetaxel and Aneustat, alone and in combination. In vitro, Aneustat markedly inhibited C4-2 cell replication in a dose-dependent manner. When Aneustat was combined with docetaxel, the growth inhibitions of the drugs were essentially additive. In vivo, however, the combination of docetaxel and Aneustat enhanced anti-tumor activity synergistically and very markedly, without inducing major host toxicity. Complete growth inhibition and shrinkage of the xenografts could be obtained with the combined drugs as distinct from the drugs on their own. Analysis of the gene expression of the xenografts using microarray indicated that docetaxel + Aneustat led to expanded anticancer activity, in particular to targeting of cancer hallmarks that were not affected by the single drugs. Our findings, obtained with a highly clinically relevant prostate cancer model, suggest, for the first time, that docetaxel-based therapy of advanced human prostate cancer may be improved by combining docetaxel with Aneustat

A case study on viziometrics: What’s the role of western blots in Alzheimer’s Disease literature?

The visual information in scientific could play an important role, but few bibliometric studies investigate it. In order to emphasize the importance of the visual aspect of scholarly communication, a new field called viziometrics is recently proposed. This paper presents an ongoing project for a case study of viziometrics where we focus on western blots within Alzheimer's Disease (AD) literature. We first develop a computer vision method to detect western blots from the images of figures. Then we extract thousands of western blots from AD papers and show a preliminary analysis

Treatment-emergent neuroendocrine prostate cancer: molecularly driven clinical guidelines

An increasingly recognized mechanism of prostate cancer resistance is the transdifferentiation from adenocarcinoma to treatment-emergent neuroendocrine prostate cancer (t-NEPC), an extremely aggressive malignancy. The incidence of t-NEPC has been increasing in recent years, in part due to novel treatments that target the androgen receptor pathway. While clinicians historically had very few options for t-NEPC detection and treatment, recent research has uncovered key diagnostic tools and therapeutic targets that can be translated into improved patient care. In this article, we will outline the clinical features of t-NEPC and its molecular pathogenesis. Importantly, we will also discuss recently uncovered molecularly based strategies aimed at improving the diagnosis and treatment of t-NEPC. Finally, we will propose a unified algorithm that integrates clinical and molecular information for the clinical management of t-NEPC