Inhibitory antibodies designed for matrix metalloproteinase modulation

The family of matrix metalloproteinases (MMPs) consists of a set of biological targets that are involved in a multitude of severe pathogenic events such as different forms of cancers or arthritis. Modulation of the target class with small molecule drugs has not led to the anticipated success until present, as all clinical trials failed due to unacceptable side effects or a lack of therapeutic outcome. Monoclonal antibodies offer a tremendous therapeutic potential given their high target selectivity and good pharmacokinetic profiles. For the treatment of a variety of diseases there are already antibody therapies available and the number is increasing. Recently, several antibodies were developed for the selective inhibition of single MMPs that showed high potency and were therefore investigated in in vivo studies with promising results. In this review, we highlight the progress that has been achieved toward the design of inhibitory antibodies that successfully modulate MMP-9 and MMP-14

The Impact of rising international interest rates on developing countries: The South Korean experience

This paper evaluates the impact of rising international interest rates on the South Korean economy during the seventies with the help of an econometric macro model. The results show that there was an induced reduction of investment and GDP, yet inflationary pressures were somewhat mitigated by a lowering of capital inflows.

On the structuralist view of inflation in some Latin American countries: A reassessment

Comparing inflation rates internationally, one finds a number of Latin American countries in the lead. Therefore, when investigating inflation in LDCs, it has become common practice to refer to these countries as prime examples. Mainly two theories have been put forward to explain Latin American inflation: the monetarist and structuralist hypotheses. While in the monetarist theory aggregate excess demand resulting from an excess supply of money is regarded as the only cause of inflation, the structuralist theory ascribes inflation also to the composition of demand for products and services accompanied by inflexibilities in the productive structure. The purpose of this paper is to give further empirical evidence for the structuralist view of inflation in six selected Latin American countries: Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru. They have all been highly prone to inflation in the past. First, we outline the theoretical background of our investigation. Subsequently, empirical tests of the hypotheses are provided. Finally, we draw some conclusions from our study and relate the findings to the discussion of the harmful effects of export instability in LDCs.

Uniformly Rotating Rings in General Relativity

In this paper, we discuss general relativistic, self-gravitating and uniformly rotating perfect fluid bodies with a toroidal topology (without central object). For the equations of state describing the fluid matter we consider polytropic as well as completely degenerate, perfect Fermi gas models. We find that the corresponding configurations possess similar properties to the homogeneous relativistic Dyson rings. On the one hand, there exists no limit to the mass for a given maximal mass-density inside the body. On the other hand, each model permits a quasistationary transition to the extreme Kerr black hole.Comment: 6 pages, 4 figures, added material and one new referenc

Consequences of simultaneous chiral symmetry breaking and deconfinement for the isospin symmetric phase diagram

The thermodynamic bag model (tdBag) has been applied widely to model quark matter properties in both heavy-ion and astrophysics communities. Several fundamental physics aspects are missing in tdBag, e.g., dynamical chiral symmetry breaking (D$\chi$SB) and repulsions due to the vector interaction are both included explicitly in the novel vBag quark matter model of Kl\"ahn and Fischer (2015) (Astrophys. J. 810, 134 (2015)). An important feature of vBag is the simultaneous D$\chi$SB and deconfinement, where the latter links vBag to a given hadronic model for the construction of the phase transition. In this article we discuss the extension to finite temperatures and the resulting phase diagram for the isospin symmetric medium.Comment: 6 pages, 2 figures, Contribution to the Topical Issue Exploring strongly interacting matter at high densities - NICA White Paper edited by David Blaschke et a