Clinical observation of treatment of fungal corneal ulcer with application of iodine tincture and fluconazole

AIM: To explore the effect of 30g/L iodine rubbed and debridement of wound together with 2g/L fluconazole in the treatment of fungal corneal ulcers. <p>METHODS: Fifty fungal keratitis cases(50 eyes)diagnosed by corneal smear examination were cleaned locally, iodine blanch. All patients were given 2g/L fluconazole for systemic treatment, treated eye with 2g/L fluconazole eye-drops and loxacin eye-drops, and 30g/L atropine eye ointment dilate the pupils.<p>RESULTS:Fifty cases(50 eyes)were selected, of which, 40 cases were healed, 8 cases were improved and 2 cases were aggravated with operation being given.<p>CONCLUSION:After early and timely diagnosis of fungal keratitis, local debridement, 30g/L iodine rubbed the wound and joint with systemic and local treatment of fluconazole can achieve good effect

Management of mother-to-child transmission of hepatitis B virus: Propositions and challenges

AbstractChronic hepatitis B virus (HBV) infection due to mother-to-child transmission (MTCT) during perinatal period remains an important global health problem. Despite standard passive–active immunoprophylaxis with hepatitis B immunoglobulin (HBIG) and hepatitis B vaccine in neonates, up to 9% of newborns still acquire HBV infection, especially these from hepatitis B e antigen (HBeAg) positive mothers. Management of HBV infection in pregnancy still need to draw careful attention because of some controversial aspects, including the failure of passive-active immunoprophylaxis in a fraction of newborns, the effect and necessity of periodical hepatitis B immunoglobulin (HBIG) injection to the mothers, the safety of antiviral prophylaxis with nucleoside/nucleotide analogs, the benefit of different delivery ways, and the safety of breastfeeding. In this review, we highlight these unsettled issues of preventive strategies in perinatal period, and we further aim to provide an optimal approach to the management of preventing MTCT of HBV infection

Transcription factor c-Myb promotes the invasion of hepatocellular carcinoma cells via increasing osteopontin expression

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Specific gene expression is tightly regulated by various transcription factors. Osteopontin (OPN) is a phosphoprotein that mediates hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) progression and metastasis. However, the mechanism of OPN up-regulation in HCC metastasis remains to be clarified.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>Oligonucleotide array-based transcription factor assays were applied to compare different activities of transcription factors in two human HCC cell lines with different OPN expression levels. The effects of one selected transcription factor on OPN expression were further evaluated.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Eleven transcription factors were over-expressed in metastatic HCC cell line HCCLM6 cells whereas twelve transcription factors were down-regulated. Electrophoretic mobility shift assays (EMSA) and reporter gene assays showed that one of up-regulated transcription factors c-Myb could bind the OPN promoter and increase its transcription activity. In addition, small interfering RNA targeting c-Myb could inhibit OPN expression and significantly decrease migration and invasion of HCCLM6 cells <it>in vitro</it>.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>Our data first demonstrate that c-Myb has a functionally important role in the regulation of OPN expression in HCC cells, suggesting that c-Myb might be a new target to control HCC metastasis.</p

An earthworm protease cleaving serum fibronectin and decreasing HBeAg in HepG2.2.15 cells

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Virus-binding activity is one of the important functions of fibronectin (FN). It has been reported that a high concentration of FN in blood improves the transmission frequency of hepatitis viruses. Therefore, to investigate a protease that hydrolyzes FN rapidly is useful to decrease the FN concentration in blood and HBV infection. So far, however, no specific protease digesting FN in serum has been reported.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>We employed a purified earthworm protease to digest serum proteins. The rapidly cleaved protein (FN) was identified by MALDI-TOF MS and western blotting. The cleavage sites were determined by N-terminus amino acid residues sequencing. The protease was orally administrated to rats to investigate whether serum FN <it>in vivo </it>became decreased. The serum FN was determined by western blotting and ELISA. In cytological studies, the protease was added to the medium in the culture of HepG2.2.15 cells and then HBsAg and HBeAg were determined by ELISA.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>The protease purified from earthworm <it>Eisenia fetida </it>was found to function as a fibronectinase (FNase). The cleavage sites on FN by the FNase were at R and K, exhibiting a trypsin alkaline serine-like function. The earthworm fibronectinase (EFNase) cleaved FN at four sites, R₂₅₉, R₁₀₀₅, K₁₅₅₇and R₂₀₃₉, among which the digested fragments at R₂₅₉, K₁₅₅₇and R₂₀₃₉were related to the virus-binding activity as reported. The serum FN was significantly decreased when the earthworm fibronectinase was orally administrated to rats. The ELISA results showed that the secretion of HBeAg from HepG2.2.15 cells was significantly inhibited in the presence of the FNase.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>The earthworm fibronectinase (EFNase) cleaves FN much faster than the other proteins in serum, showing a potential to inhibit HBV infection through its suppressing the level of HBeAg. This suggests that EFNase is probably used as one of the candidates for the therapeutic agents to treat hepatitis virus infection.</p

Experimental Investigation on the Influence of Refrigerant Charge on the Performance of Trans-critical CO2 Water-Water Heat Pump

Natural refrigerant CO2 is widely used in refrigeration and heat pump systems. It is of great significance for reductions of ozone depletion and global warming. The efficiency of heat pump system is affected by many factors. The amount of refrigerant charge in the heat pump is a primary parameter that influences the energy efficiency. Undercharge or overcharge of refrigerant degrade its performance and deteriorate system reliability. Therefore, heat pump should be charged with an optimum amount of refrigerant to achieve high performance. However, it is difficult to calculate the optimum charge accurately because of the various components and operating parameters. Â In this paper, a trans-critical CO2Â heat pump system is set up to investigate the influence of refrigerant charge on the performance of a small-sized heat pump water heater. The trans-critical CO2Â heat pump system is composed of a rotary compressor, a tube-in-tube evaporator and gas cooler, an electronic expansion valve (EEV), and an internal heat exchanger (IHX). The objective of this study is to analyze the characteristics of the CO2 heat pump under various refrigerant charging conditions. Therefore, the performance of the CO2Â system was measured and discussed on the basis of refrigerant charge amount. Â Based on the experimental results, the effects of refrigerant charge on the power of system, rejection pressure, evaporating pressure, mass flow rate and coefficient of performance (COP) were analyzed with different EEV openings. The experimental results show that the COP was strongly related to CO2 mass charge and that the formation of the trans-critical cycle depended on CO2 mass charge greatly. The pressures in the gas cooler and the evaporator increased with the rise of refrigerant charge. The compression ratio decreased with the increase of the refrigerant charge. The COP has a maximum value at a specific CO2 mass charge. Undercharged CO2 systems could result in a fast decrease of the heating capacity and COP. However, overcharged CO2 systems could cause an abrupt increase of compressor power consumption. The heating cycle displayed different characteristics with different CO2 mass charges. The optimum CO2 mass charges varied with different EEV openings, and it could be determined according to several parameters

The protective effect of resveratrol on human lens epithelial cells against ultraviolet-induced apoptosis

AIM: To investigate the protective effect of resveratrol on human lens epithelial cells against ultraviolet-induced apoptosis. METHODS:Subcultured human lens epithelial cell line, ultraviolet induced cell apoptosis, 20μmol/L resveratrol pretreated cell, the indicators change was observed: rate of apoptosis was detected by flow cytometry and apoptosis-related factors of caspses-3 and caspase-9 were detected by colorimetric detection, ultrastructure changes were observed under transmission electron microscope. RESULTS: Flow cytometry instrument testing found that resveratrol can suppress the apoptosis induced by ultraviolet irradiation, caspses-3 and caspase-9 content in positive control group were significantly higher than that of the negative control group at the same time period, the difference was statistically significant(P<0.05); caspses-3 and caspase-9 content in experimental group were lower than that in the positive control group at the same time, the difference was statistically significant(P<0.05). In addition, the damage of human lens epithelial cells was alleviated with the incubation time of resveratrol elongated. CONCLUSION:Resveratrol may inhibit ultraviolet-induced apoptosis of human lens epithelial cells, it has preventive function against radioactive cataract, and it can provide reliable evidence for pursuing effective medicine to prevent and treat cataract

From imitation to innovation: A study of China's drug R&amp;D and relevant national policies

Research & Development (R&D) plays an increasingly important role in China's pharmaceutical industry. To gain a competitive edge in the global pharmaceutical market, the current national strategy of China forcefully pushes for independent drug innovations. This article investigates the historical, legal, and institutional contexts in which China's drug R&D has evolved. Based on an analysis of the drug R&D evolution and national policies in China, it predicts the future trend of China's policies relevant to drug innovations. This paper helps to understand the impact of national policies on drug R&D in China, which can be used to inform decision-making on investments in China's pharmaceutical market or conducting technology trade and international cooperation with Chinese partners

COCO-O: A Benchmark for Object Detectors under Natural Distribution Shifts

Practical object detection application can lose its effectiveness on image inputs with natural distribution shifts. This problem leads the research community to pay more attention on the robustness of detectors under Out-Of-Distribution (OOD) inputs. Existing works construct datasets to benchmark the detector's OOD robustness for a specific application scenario, e.g., Autonomous Driving. However, these datasets lack universality and are hard to benchmark general detectors built on common tasks such as COCO. To give a more comprehensive robustness assessment, we introduce COCO-O(ut-of-distribution), a test dataset based on COCO with 6 types of natural distribution shifts. COCO-O has a large distribution gap with training data and results in a significant 55.7% relative performance drop on a Faster R-CNN detector. We leverage COCO-O to conduct experiments on more than 100 modern object detectors to investigate if their improvements are credible or just over-fitting to the COCO test set. Unfortunately, most classic detectors in early years do not exhibit strong OOD generalization. We further study the robustness effect on recent breakthroughs of detector's architecture design, augmentation and pre-training techniques. Some empirical findings are revealed: 1) Compared with detection head or neck, backbone is the most important part for robustness; 2) An end-to-end detection transformer design brings no enhancement, and may even reduce robustness; 3) Large-scale foundation models have made a great leap on robust object detection. We hope our COCO-O could provide a rich testbed for robustness study of object detection. The dataset will be available at \url{https://github.com/alibaba/easyrobust/tree/main/benchmarks/coco_o}.Comment: To appear in ICCV2023, https://github.com/alibaba/easyrobust/tree/main/benchmarks/coco_