PDB73 – The Expected Value Of Bio-Artificial Pancreas Development In View Of Endocrinologists' And Patients' Preferences

Objectives Islet transplantation is an accepted transplantation method in type I Diabetes Mellitus, yet islet survival is hampered due to an insufficient transplantation site and severe immunological and inflammatory responses. The development of a bio-artificial pancreas (BAP) may contribute to transplanted islet functionality and survival. The objective of this study is to identify the most important transplantation characteristics and to asses patients’ and endocrinologists´ preferences for three potential BAP scenarios in order to guide further development. Methods The current standard of care and characteristics that determine clinical decisions for a particular transplantation method were analysed based on a literature search, semi-structured interviews and focus groups. A decision tree was constructed covering the main attributes effectiveness, patient safety, impact of the treatment for the patient and the required amount of donor material. The analytic hierarchy process was used to obtain the relative weights for each defined attribute in type I DM patients (n=21) and endocrinologists (n=12). Based on these weights, overall preferences for three potential BAP scenarios were calculated and compared to conventional pancreas and islets transplantation. Results The three most important treatment attributes are the effectiveness of the transplant for glucose control, patient safety and the surgical procedure. However, there were considerable differences between patients and endocrinologists in the importance of effectiveness of the transplant (weights were 0.471 and 0.257 respectively) and patient safety (0.331 and 0.423). While considering both endocrinologists’ and patients’ preferences, all three BAP scenarios assessed gained a higher overall preference in comparison to conventional islet transplantation. Conclusions This study indicates the prospects of BAP development. Nevertheless, the study also highlights the discrepancies between endocrinologists’ and type 1 diabetes patients’ preferences. In the future, BAP developers can benefit from this multidisciplinary approach by critically reviewing their BAP design, in view of patient safety and clinical performanc

Search for jet extinction in the inclusive jet-pT spectrum from proton-proton collisions at s=8 TeV

Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published articles title, journal citation, and DOI.The first search at the LHC for the extinction of QCD jet production is presented, using data collected with the CMS detector corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 10.7  fb−1 of proton-proton collisions at a center-of-mass energy of 8 TeV. The extinction model studied in this analysis is motivated by the search for signatures of strong gravity at the TeV scale (terascale gravity) and assumes the existence of string couplings in the strong-coupling limit. In this limit, the string model predicts the suppression of all high-transverse-momentum standard model processes, including jet production, beyond a certain energy scale. To test this prediction, the measured transverse-momentum spectrum is compared to the theoretical prediction of the standard model. No significant deficit of events is found at high transverse momentum. A 95% confidence level lower limit of 3.3 TeV is set on the extinction mass scale

Searches for electroweak neutralino and chargino production in channels with Higgs, Z, and W bosons in pp collisions at 8 TeV

Searches for supersymmetry (SUSY) are presented based on the electroweak pair production of neutralinos and charginos, leading to decay channels with Higgs, Z, and W bosons and undetected lightest SUSY particles (LSPs). The data sample corresponds to an integrated luminosity of about 19.5 fb(-1) of proton-proton collisions at a center-of-mass energy of 8 TeV collected in 2012 with the CMS detector at the LHC. The main emphasis is neutralino pair production in which each neutralino decays either to a Higgs boson (h) and an LSP or to a Z boson and an LSP, leading to hh, hZ, and ZZ states with missing transverse energy (E-T(miss)). A second aspect is chargino-neutralino pair production, leading to hW states with E-T(miss). The decays of a Higgs boson to a bottom-quark pair, to a photon pair, and to final states with leptons are considered in conjunction with hadronic and leptonic decay modes of the Z and W bosons. No evidence is found for supersymmetric particles, and 95% confidence level upper limits are evaluated for the respective pair production cross sections and for neutralino and chargino mass values

Immuno-regenerative biomaterials for in situ cardiovascular tissue engineering – Do patient characteristics warrant precision engineering?

In situ tissue engineering using bioresorbable material implants - or scaffolds - that harness the patient's immune response while guiding neotissue formation at the site of implantation is emerging as a novel therapy to regenerate human tissues. For the cardiovascular system, the use of such implants, like blood vessels and heart valves, is gradually entering the stage of clinical translation. This opens up the question if and to what extent patient characteristics influence tissue outcomes, necessitating the precision engineering of scaffolds to guide patient-specific neo-tissue formation. Because of the current scarcity of human in vivo d