Breast cancer stroma frequently recruits fetal derived cells during pregnancy

Breast carcinomas associated with pregnancy display a high frequency of inflammatory types, multifocal lesions and lymph node metastasis. Because pregnancy results in transfer to mothers of foetal stem cells that can migrate and differentiate into various tissues, we addressed the issue of whether such cells are present in breast carcinoma associated with pregnancy

Tolerogenic Function of Dimeric Forms of HLA-G Recombinant Proteins: A Comparative Study In Vivo

HLA-G is a natural tolerogenic molecule involved in the best example of tolerance to foreign tissues there is: the maternal-fetal tolerance. The further involvement of HLA-G in the tolerance of allogeneic transplants has also been demonstrated and some of its mechanisms of action have been elucidated. For these reasons, therapeutic HLA-G molecules for tolerance induction in transplantation are actively investigated. In the present study, we studied the tolerogenic functions of three different HLA-G recombinant proteins: HLA-G heavy chain fused to β2-microglobulin (B2M), HLA-G heavy chain fused to B2M and to the Fc portion of an immunoglobulin, and HLA-G alpha-1 domain either fused to the Fc part of an immunoglobulin or as a synthetic peptide. Our results demonstrate the tolerogenic function of B2M-HLA-G fusion proteins, and especially of B2M-HLA-G5, which were capable of significantly delaying allogeneic skin graft rejection in a murine in vivo transplantation model. The results from our studies suggest that HLA-G recombinant proteins are relevant candidates for tolerance induction in human transplantation

Risk factors in the development of stem cell therapy

Stem cell therapy holds the promise to treat degenerative diseases, cancer and repair of damaged tissues for which there are currently no or limited therapeutic options. The potential of stem cell therapies has long been recognised and the creation of induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSC) has boosted the stem cell field leading to increasing development and scientific knowledge. Despite the clinical potential of stem cell based medicinal products there are also potential and unanticipated risks. These risks deserve a thorough discussion within the perspective of current scientific knowledge and experience. Evaluation of potential risks should be a prerequisite step before clinical use of stem cell based medicinal products

Computational neural network in melanocytic lesions diagnosis: artificial intelligence to improve diagnosis in dermatology?

Diagnosis in dermatology is largely based on contextual factors going far beyond the visual and dermoscopic inspection of a lesion. Diagnostic tools such as the different types of dermoscopy, confocal microscopy and optical coherence tomography (OCT) are available and all of these have shown their importance in improving the dermatologist's ability, especially in the diagnosis of skin cancer. Their use, however, remains limited and time consuming, and optimizing their practice appears to be difficult, requiring extensive pre-processing, lesion segmentation and extraction of domain-specific visual features before classification. Over the last two decades, image recognition has been a matter of interest in a large part of our society and in industry, leading to the development of several techniques such as convolutional processing combined with artificial intelligence or neural networks (CNN/ANN). The aim of the present manuscript is to provide a short overview of the most recent data about CNN in the field of dermatology, mainly in skin cancer detection and its diagnosis