Review: Oncolytic virotherapy – A novel strategy for cancer therapy

Oncolytic virotherapy is a new modality of cancer treatment which uses competent replicating viruses to destroy cancer cells. This field progressed from earlier observations of accidental viral infections causing remission in many malignancies to virus drugs targeting and killing cancer cells. More competent and specific viruses which attack tumor cells but not healthy cells could be made with advancements in the field of genetic engineering. Studying virus as a drug has benefits of secure handling of all aspects related to this advancing field. In many ways virus given for treatment is comparable to a drug. The virus lies in the grey area of life and death and thus outside the body it is same as an unopened drug. Once inside a biological system, it starts acting targetting specific systems sine qua non as a drug. This review compares virus to a drug and deals with its  pharmacokinetics, pharmacodynamics, virus drug interactions and combination virotherapy of this new treatment modality.Keyword: Oncolytic virotherapy

An assessment of knowledge, attitude and practices (KAP) towards warfarin medication among patients with prosthetic valve in a tertiary care hospital of south India

Background: Warfarin is a drug with narrow therapeutic index. It requires varied adequate doses for achieving target INR so as to prevent episodes of thromboembolism. It is important to properly educate the patient while prescribing this drug to reduce the side effects and maintain perfect anticoagulation status. This study was done to assess the baseline Knowledge, Attitude and Practices (KAP) towards warfarin medication among patients with cardiac valve replacement in a tertiary care hospital of south India to get a baseline data which can recommend implementation of health education programs targeting these patients.Methods: An observational cross-sectional study was approved by Institute Ethics Committee JIPMER, Puducherry. It included patients on treatment with warfarin maintenance therapy for a period of not less than three months following cardiac valve replacement in the months of October 2016 to October 2017. The questionnaire included 39 questions of qualitative and quantitative basis, which was scored for a total of 50 and analysed using SPSS software.Results: About 240 patients were interviewed who attended cardiothoracic vascular surgery outpatient department and taking warfarin for at least 3 months following surgery of valve replacement. Patients were divided into two groups. Group A included patients who achieved target INR and group B are those out of target INR. 15.7 percent (35) had low score, 76.2 (160) had medium score and 15 (7.1) percent had high scores in group A. In group B 22(81.5%) had medium score and 5 (18.5%) had high score. The median score was more among patients with higher education (p=0.01). There was no significant difference between scores between different age groups or profession.Conclusions: Lack of adequate knowledge exists in patients who are followed in CTVS OPD when assessed about the basic nature of their disease and drug use. It has been shown that group B had more score which may be due to more education they may have received owing to non-attainment of target INR. This study acts as a baseline and thus advocates the need of proper patient education for patients taking warfarin which may improve the treatment outcome

A Word Embedding Based Approach for Focused Web Crawling Using the Recurrent Neural Network

Learning-based focused crawlers download relevant uniform resource locators (URLs) from the web for a specific topic. Several studies have used the term frequency-inverse document frequency (TF-IDF) weighted cosine vector as an input feature vector for learning algorithms. TF-IDF-based crawlers calculate the relevance of a web page only if a topic word co-occurs on the said page, failing which it is considered irrelevant. Similarity is not considered even if a synonym of a term co-occurs on a web page. To resolve this challenge, this paper proposes a new methodology that integrates the Adagrad-optimized Skip Gram Negative Sampling (A-SGNS)-based word embedding and the Recurrent Neural Network (RNN).The cosine similarity is calculated from the word embedding matrix to form a feature vector that is given as an input to the RNN to predict the relevance of the website. The performance of the proposed method is evaluated using the harvest rate (hr) and irrelevance ratio (ir). The proposed methodology outperforms existing methodologies with an average harvest rate of 0.42 and irrelevance ratio of 0.58

Quality, quantity and recovery of DNA content from routine blood samples and genotyping success rate: comparison between phenol chloroform method (PCM) with a new kit-based DNA extraction method (KBM)

Background: DNA extraction has become a baseline method for molecular biology studies. There are a variety of methods available for this purpose. Newer kit-based methods (KBM) are easy and less time consuming than traditional chemical methods of extraction like phenol chloroform method (PCM). Though estimates of quality from different methods are available in labels, this study compared the practical outcomes regarding quantity, quality, DNA recovery rate and assessed the outcomes at two different time points.Methods: This study was done as a secondary analysis from an ongoing project. The quantity and quality of DNA isolated from the same group of 100 deidentified blood samples by PCM and KBM were analysed using Multi analyzer and repeated after a period of 3 months. Genotyping of the samples were done by RT-PCR. The quantity, quality and amplification proportion were compared between two groups to reach the inference.Results: The median (range) concentration of DNA by PCM was 543.27 (960.59) µg/ml and that of KBM was 32.115 (36.73) µg/ml. The quality of DNA as measured by absorbance at 260/280 nm was 1.84 in PCM and 1.81 in KBM (p>0.05). Genotyping success rate was 78% in PCM and 98% in KBM (p = 0.002). The DNA recovery rate was 96% in PCM and 80% in KBM (p=0.014).Conclusions: The median concentration of DNA obtained from PCM was more compared to KBM. The quality of DNA was comparable in both the groups. The genotyping success rate was more in KBM group. The DNA recovery rate at 3 months was more in PCM group

ADVENT OF AUGMENTED REALITY EXPERIENCE IN RETAIL AND ONLINE SHOPPING AND ITS INFLUENCING SIGNIFICANCE IN FUTURE

Augmented Reality (AR) is a trending technology that augments or superimposes an image generated by a computer system virtually into the real world environment for the user’s viewpoint using a smart phone or other hand held devices. AR shows recent advancements in the shopping domain with various implementation trails and refinement. The simplicity and flexibility in online shopping where people stay in their own place and do shopping brought a great challenge to retail shopping environment today. Retail stores are now struggling a lot to bring in the customers and the foot traffic has been greatly reduced due to which online sales are boosting and retail sales are stalling. This necessitates to bring new technological innovations to offline shopping to attract people. With the use of AR, it is possible to merge digital component to physical products in the store to stimulate the engagement of the shopping experience with more fun and joy. On the other hand, in the online shopping, though user reviews and product showcase aids the customers to analyze the quality, look and feel of diverse products, the buyer still cannot see how exactly the product fits in a real environment or how it works. Here plays AR a vital role in online shopping where it uses animations and visualization techniques to offer more value to their shoppers virtually aiding to see exactly the look of the product in user environment. This paper explains the advancement of AR in both retail and online shopping of various product domains with an implementation model of ShopAR for Online shopping and AR significance in near future

Palm oil: features and applications

Palm fruits are the source of two distinct but related vegetable oils, namely palm oil and palm kernel oil. Palm oil has many food and industrial applications. Ever-increasing demands for palm oil have substantially impacted its industry, creating some environmental concerns. Both types of oil are high in saturated fatty acids with potential cardiovascular risks. Several attempts have been made to reduce undesirable health and environmental impacts. However, additional research and development activities are needed to meet the concerns of the medical professionals and environmental activists

2,3,4,9-Tetra­hydro-1H-carbazole

In the title compound, C12H13N, two methyl­ene C atoms of the cyclo­hexene ring are disordered over two sites with occupancies of 0.591 (10) and 0.409 (10); both disorder components adopt half-chair conformations. The crystal structure is stabilized by inter­molecular N—H⋯π and C—H⋯π inter­actions

Nanoparticle delivery systems in the treatment of diabetes complications

Diabetes mellitus, an incurable metabolic disease, is characterized by changes in the homeostasis of blood sugar levels, being the subcutaneous injection of insulin the first line treatment. This administration route is however associated with limited patients compliance, due to the risk of pain, discomfort and local infection. Nanoparticles have been proposed as insulin carriers to make possible the administration of the peptide via friendlier pathways without the need of injection, i.e., via oral or nasal routes. Nanoparticles stand for particles in the nanometer range that can be obtained from different materials (e.g., polysaccharides, synthetic polymers, lipid) and are commonly used with the aim to improve the physicochemical stability of the loaded drug and thereby its bioavailability. This review discusses the use of different types of nanoparticles (e.g., polymeric and lipid nanoparticles, liposomes, dendrimers, niosomes, micelles, nanoemulsions and also drug nanosuspensions) for improved delivery of different oral hypoglycemic agents in comparison to conventional therapies.The authors acknowledge the financial support received from Portuguese Science and Technology Foundation (FCT/MCT) and from European Funds (PRODER/COMPETE) under the project reference M-ERA-NET/0004/2015-PAIRED, co-financed by FEDER, under the Partnership Agreement PT2020. The authors also acknowledge the support of the research project: “Nutraceutica come supporto nutrizionale nel paziente oncologico”, CUP: B83D18000140007.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio