Multidisciplinary of anti-COVID-19 battle: from immunological weapons to ecological interventions.

The COVID-19 pandemic is not just a medical and epidemiological problem. In fact, its impact concerns numerous aspects of human life (such as social and the political-economic dimension). This review aims at highlighting some crucial and neglected aspects of the pandemic in order to include them into a more general framework for the understanding of the phenomenon. Accordingly, it is structured as follows. First, after e brief recap of COVID-19 onset, it is argued the so-called proximate causes of the pandemic, i.e., the mechanisms by which viruses infect their hosts and the patterns of spread of the resulting pathologies, are not enough for a more adequate understanding of it. Second, it is shown how possible solutions to the risk of an upcoming pandemic involve studying the ultimate causes of this phenomenon. This means understanding not only how COVID-19 has become a global issue but also why it was possible for this to happen. Next, it is argued that is urgent to go to the root of the possible conditions: thus looking at the ecological dimension of diseases, the role of microorganisms in evolution, up to rethinking the organization of health systems. Third, to keep these very different perspectives together entails the study of COVID-19 from the point of view of the relationships between biological entities in a purely systemic dimension. Fourth, special attention is given to the symbiotic perspective offered by the study of the microbiota. It is argued how this perspective on microbiota provides an innovative interpretative lens with which to analyze various aspects (from the immunological to the ecosystemic one) of the pandemic. In conclusion, it is claimed that this field of study could perhaps offer not only elements that will be useful to make the treatment and containment strategies of the pandemic effective in its mechanisms, but also may suggest innovative elements for the solutions about the deep reasons that have made COVID-19 a global issue

T Cells and Adoptive Immunotherapy: Recent Developments and Future Prospects in Gastrointestinal Oncology

Gastrointestinal oncology is one of the foremost causes of death: the gastric cancer accounts for 10.4% of cancer deaths worldwide, the pancreatic cancer for 6%, and finally, the colorectal cancer for 9% of all cancer-related deaths. For all these gastrointestinal cancers, surgical tumor resection remains the primary curative treatment, but the overall 5-year survival rate remains poor, ranging between 20–25%; the addition of combined modality strategies (pre- or postoperative chemoradiotherapy or perioperative chemotherapy) results in 5-year survival rates of only 30–35%. Therefore, many investigators believe that the potential for making significant progress lies on understanding and exploiting the molecular biology of gastrointestinal tumors to investigate new therapeutic strategies such as specific immunotherapy. In this paper we will focus on recent knowledge concerning the role of T cells and the use of T adoptive immunotherapy in the treatment of gastrointestinal cancers

What is recent in pancreatic cancer immunotherapy?

Pancreatic cancer (PC) represents an unresolved therapeutic challenge, due to the poor prognosis and the reduced response to currently available treatments. Pancreatic cancer is the most lethal type of digestive cancers, with a median survival of 4-6 months. Only a small proportion of PC patients is curative by surgical resection, whilst standard chemotherapy for patients in advanced disease generates only modest effects with considerable toxic damages. Thus, new therapeutic approaches, specially specific treatments such as immunotherapy, are needed. In this paper we analyze recent preclinical and clinical efforts towards immunotherapy of pancreatic cancer, including passive and active immunotherapy approaches, designed to target pancreatic-cancer-associated antigens and to elicit an antitumor response in vivo

Gut microbiota and artificial intelligence approaches: A scoping review

This article aims to provide a thorough overview of the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques in studying the gut microbiota and its role in the diagnosis and treatment of some important diseases. The association between microbiota and diseases, together with its clinical relevance, is still difficult to interpret. The advances in AI techniques, such as Machine Learning (ML) and Deep Learning (DL), can help clinicians in processing and interpreting these massive data sets. Two research groups have been involved in this Scoping Review, working in two different areas of Europe: Florence and Sarajevo. The papers included in the review describe the use of ML or DL methods applied to the study of human gut microbiota. In total, 1109 papers were considered in this study. After elimination, a final set of 16 articles was considered in the scoping review. Different AI techniques were applied in the reviewed papers. Some papers applied ML, while others applied DL techniques. 11 papers evaluated just different ML algorithms (ranging from one to eight algorithms applied to one dataset). The remaining five papers examined both ML and DL algorithms. The most applied ML algorithm was Random Forest and it also exhibited the best performances