Osteosarcoma: Current status of immunotherapy and future trends (Review)

Osteosarcoma is the most common primary bone tumor and represents a major therapeutic challenge in medical oncology. While the use of aggressive chemotherapy has drastically improved the prognosis of the patients with non-metastatic osteosarcomas, the very poor prognosis of patients with metastasis have led to the exploration of new, more effective and less toxic treatments, such as immunotherapy for curing osteosarcoma. Compared to the numerous reports describing successful immunotherapy for other solid tumors, the number of reports concerning immunotherapy for osteosarcoma is low. However, this therapeutic strategy opens new areas for the treatment of osteosarcoma. In this review, the reasons for delay and all elements essential to develop immunotherapy concerning osteosarcoma are defined. Several pieces of evidence strongly support the potential capability of new therapies such as cellular therapy and gene therapy to eradicate osteosarcoma. Thus, clinical human trials using peptides, cytokines and dendritic cells have been performed. Tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes and some tumor antigens have been identified in osteosarcoma and resulted in an important breakthrough in cellular immunotherapy. Also, RANKL/RANK/OPG, the key regulator of bone metabolism, is a hot spot in this field as therapeutic tools. Immunotherapy for osteosarcomas has great potential, promising improvement in the survival rate and better quality of life for the patients

Primary total knee arthroplasty in the management of epiphyseal fracture around the knee

SummaryIntroductionOver the past few years the use of arthroplasty was broadened to treating complex epiphyseal fractures at the shoulder and elbow joints. Similar trends to treat this type of fractures at the knee are less documented. Based on a multicenter retrospective series study, the aims of this work is to evaluate the short term clinical results of total knee prostheses in the management of comminuted epiphyseal fractures around the knee, to identify the technical issues and fine tune the indications.Material and methodsFollowing the initiative of the French Hip and Knee Society (SFHG) and the Traumatology Study Group (GETRAUM), 26 charts from eight different centers in France were included in this multicenter retrospective series. Inclusion criteria were: primary total knee arthroplasty (TKA) in the management of complex articular fractures involving the proximal end of the tibia or distal end of the femur. Surgical features were identified and complications were analyzed. The assessment protocol at last follow-up was standardized and included patient demographic data, analysis of the Parker and IKS scores.ResultsDuring the immediate postoperative period, six patients (23%) reported a general complication and four patients (15%) a local arthroplasty-related complication. At last follow-up (mean 16.2 months), the overall final Parker score was 6.3 (a mean decrease of 1.7) and the mean IKS knee score was 82 points for a mean function score of 54 points.DiscussionPrimary TKA is a suitable management option for complex fractures in autonomous elderly patients suffering from knee osteoarthritis. The key technical details of this procedure should be respected and meticulously planned to achieve optimal results and limit the risk of complications. This risk in these acute complex fractures remains higher than after conventional TKA but comparable to that observed after TKA for post-traumatic arthritis.Level of evidenceIV; retrospective cohort study

The Computer Science Ontology: A Large-Scale Taxonomy of Research Areas

Ontologies of research areas are important tools for characterising, exploring, and analysing the research landscape. Some fields of research are comprehensively described by large-scale taxonomies, e.g., MeSH in Biology and PhySH in Physics. Conversely, current Computer Science taxonomies are coarse-grained and tend to evolve slowly. For instance, the ACM classification scheme contains only about 2K research topics and the last version dates back to 2012. In this paper, we introduce the Computer Science Ontology (CSO), a large-scale, automatically generated ontology of research areas, which includes about 26K topics and 226K semantic relationships. It was created by applying the Klink-2 algorithm on a very large dataset of 16M scientific articles. CSO presents two main advantages over the alternatives: i) it includes a very large number of topics that do not appear in other classifications, and ii) it can be updated automatically by running Klink-2 on recent corpora of publications. CSO powers several tools adopted by the editorial team at Springer Nature and has been used to enable a variety of solutions, such as classifying research publications, detecting research communities, and predicting research trends. To facilitate the uptake of CSO we have developed the CSO Portal, a web application that enables users to download, explore, and provide granular feedback on CSO at different levels. Users can use the portal to rate topics and relationships, suggest missing relationships, and visualise sections of the ontology. The portal will support the publication of and access to regular new releases of CSO, with the aim of providing a comprehensive resource to the various communities engaged with scholarly data

Magnitudes of submarine groundwater discharge from marine and terrestrial sources: Indian River lagoon

[1] Magnitudes of terrestrial (fresh) and marine (saline) sources of submarine groundwater discharge (SGD) are estimated for a transect across Indian River Lagoon, Florida. Two independent techniques (seepage meters and pore water Cl À concentrations) show terrestrial SGD decreases linearly to around 22 m offshore, and these techniques, together with a model based on the width of the outflow face, indicate a cumulative discharge of between 0.02 and 0.9 m 3 /d per meter of shoreline. Seepage meters and models of the deficiencies in 222 Rn activity in shallow sediments indicate marine SGD discharges of roughly 117 m 3 /d per meter of shoreline across the entire 1800-m-wide transect. Two surface streams nearest the transect have an average discharge of about 28 m 3 /d per meter of shoreline. Marine SGD is thus 4 times greater then surface water discharge and more than 2 orders of magnitude greater than terrestrial SGD. The magnitude of the terrestrial SGD is limited by the amount of regional precipitation, evaporation, recharge, and groundwater usage, while marine SGD is limited only by processes circulating marine water into and out of the sediments. The large magnitude of marine SGD means that it could be important for estuarine cycling of reactive components such as nutrients and metals with only slight modification from estuarine water compositions. The small magnitude of terrestrial SGD means that large differences from estuarine water composition would be required to affect chemical cycling

A compactness theorem for scalar-flat metrics on manifolds with boundary

Let (M,g) be a compact Riemannian manifold with boundary. This paper is concerned with the set of scalar-flat metrics which are in the conformal class of g and have the boundary as a constant mean curvature hypersurface. We prove that this set is compact for dimensions greater than or equal to 7 under the generic condition that the trace-free 2nd fundamental form of the boundary is nonzero everywhere.Comment: 49 pages. Final version, to appear in Calc. Var. Partial Differential Equation

An Exploratory Study into the Factors Impeding Ethical Consumption

Although consumers are increasingly engaged with ethical factors when forming opinions about products and making purchase decisions, recent studies have highlighted significant differences between consumers’ intentions to consume ethically, and their actual purchase behaviour. This article contributes to an understanding of this “ethical purchasing gap” through a review of existing literature, and the inductive analysis of focus group discussions. A model is suggested which includes exogenous variables such as moral maturity and age which have been well covered in the literature, together with further impeding factors identified from the focus group discussions. For some consumers, inertia in purchasing behaviour was such that the decision-making process was devoid of ethical considerations. Several manifested their ethical views through post-purchase dissonance and retrospective feelings of guilt. Others displayed a reluctance to consume ethically due to personal constraints, a perceived negative impact on image or quality, or an outright negation of responsibility. Those who expressed a desire to consume ethically often seemed deterred by cynicism, which caused them to question the impact they, as an individual, could achieve. These findings enhance the understanding of ethical consumption decisions and provide a platform for future research in this area

The role of the interaction matrix in mean-field spin glasses

Mean-field models of 2-spin Ising spin glasses with interaction matrices taken from ensembles which are invariant under O(N) transformations are studied. A general study shows that the nature of the spin glass transition can be deduced from the eigenvalue spectrum of the interaction matrix. A simple replica approach is derived to carry out the average over the O(N) disorder. The analytic results are confirmed by extensive Monte Carlo simulations for large system sizes and by exact enumeration for small system sizes.Comment: 14 pages, 4 figure

Using a virtual environment to assess cognition in the elderly

YesEarly diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is essential if treatments are to be administered at an earlier point in time before neurons degenerate to a stage beyond repair. In order for early detection to occur tools used to detect the disorder must be sensitive to the earliest of cognitive impairments. Virtual reality (VR) technology offers opportunities to provide products which attempt to mimic daily life situations, as much as is possible, within the computational environment. This may be useful for the detection of cognitive difficulties. We develop a virtual simulation designed to assess visuospatial memory in order to investigate cognitive function in a group of healthy elderly participants and those with a mild cognitive impairment. Participants were required to guide themselves along a virtual path to reach a virtual destination which they were required to remember. The preliminary results indicate that this virtual simulation has the potential to be used for detection of early AD since significant correlations of scores on the virtual environment with existing neuropsychological tests were found. Furthermore, the test discriminated between healthy elderly participants and those with a mild cognitive impairment (MCI)