Delivery of immunomodulatory miRNAs using genetically modified influenza viruses

This study investigated a reverse genetics strategy to generate recombinant influenza viruses capable of enhancing immunity through expressing immunomodulatory microRNAs. This strategy can be applied to generate self-adjuvanting live attenuated vaccines in the future.<br /

A Bootstrapping Method for Finer-Grained Opinion Mining Using Graph Model

PACLIC 23 / City University of Hong Kong / 3-5 December 200

Enhanced immunogenicity following miR-155 incorporation into the influenza A virus genome

Influenza A vaccine efficacy in the elderly is generally poor and so identification of novel molecular adjuvants to improve immunogenicity is important to reduce the overall burden of disease. Short non-coding RNAs, known as microRNAs (miRNAs) are known to regulate gene expression and have the potential to influence immune responses. One such miRNA, miR-155, has been shown to modulate T and B cell development and function. We incorporated miR-155 into the influenza A virus (IAV) genome creating a self-adjuvanting \u27live vaccine\u27 with the ability to modify immunogenicity. Infection of mice with a recombinant influenza virus encoding miR-155 in the NS gene segment altered epitope-specific expansion of influenza-specific CD8(+) T cells and induced significantly higher levels of neutralising antibody

Adapting International Standard for Asian Language Technologies

Corpus-based approaches and statistical approaches have been the main stream of natural language processing research for the past two decades. Language resources play a key role in such approaches, but there is an insufficient amount of language resources in many Asian languages. In this situation, standardisation of language resources would be of great help in developing resources in new languages. This paper presents the latest development efforts of our project which aims at creating a common standard for Asian language resources that is compatible with an international standard. In particular, the paper focuses on i) lexical specification and data categories relevant for building multilingual lexical resources for Asian languages; ii) a core upper-layer ontology needed for ensuring multilingual interoperability and iii) the evaluation platform used to test the entire architectural framework

Query Expansion using LMF-Compliant Lexical Resources

This paper reports prototype multilingual query expansion system relying on LMF compliant lexical resources. The system is one of the deliverables of a three-year project aiming at establishing an international standard for language resources which is applicable to Asian languages. Our important contributions to ISO 24613, standard Lexical Markup Framework (LMF) include its robustness to deal with Asian languages, and its applicability to cross-lingual query tasks, as illustrated by the prototype introduced in this paper

Infection of domestic pigs with a genotype II potent strain of ASFV causes cytokine storm and lymphocyte mass reduction

The whole-genome sequence of an African swine fever virus (ASFV) strain (HuB/HH/2019) isolated from Hubei, China, was highly similar to that of the Georgia 2007/1 strain ASFV. After infection with strong strains, domestic pigs show typical symptoms of infection, including fever, depression, reddening of the skin, hemorrhagic swelling of various tissues, and dysfunction. The earliest detoxification occurred in pharyngeal swabs at 4 days post-infection. The viral load in the blood was extremely high, and ASFV was detected in multiple tissues, with the highest viral loads in the spleen and lungs. An imbalance between pro- and anti-inflammatory factors in the serum leads to an excessive inflammatory response in the body. Immune factor expression is suppressed without effectively eliciting an immune defense. Antibodies against p30 were not detected in acutely dead domestic pigs. Sequencing of the peripheral blood mononuclear cell transcriptome revealed elevated transcription of genes associated with immunity, defense, and stress. The massive reduction in lymphocyte counts in the blood collapses the body’s immune system. An excessive inflammatory response with a massive reduction in the lymphocyte count may be an important cause of mortality in domestic pigs. These two reasons have inspired researchers to reduce excessive inflammatory responses and stimulate effective immune responses for future vaccine development