Toward Safety Protocols for Peripheral Nerve Stimulation (PNS): A Computational and Experimental Approach.

As the clinical applicability of peripheral nerve stimulation (PNS) expands, the need for PNS-specific safety criteria becomes pressing. This study addresses this need, utilizing a novel machine learning and computational bio-electromagnetics modeling platform to establish a safety criterion that captures the effects of fields and currents induced on axons. Our approach is comprised of three steps: experimentation, model creation, and predictive simulation.

Resonant and Non-Resonant Impurity States Related to GaAs/AlGaAs Quantum Well Sub-Bands.

The energy positions and wave function shapes of the ground and excited states of impurities, including resonance states, are studied using the expansion of the impurity wave function in basis functions. The structures under study are rectangular GaAs/AlGaAs quantum wells with four different widths. In all cases, the impurity binding energy (relative to the corresponding sub-band) has a maximum at or near the center of the quantum well, decreases as the heterointerface is approached, and apparently has a limit of 0 if the impurity moves deeper into the barrier.

Cancer Cell's Achilles Heels: Considerations for Design of Anti-Cancer Drug Combinations.

Loss of function screens using shRNA (short hairpin RNA) and CRISPR (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats) are routinely used to identify genes that modulate responses of tumor cells to anti-cancer drugs. Here, by integrating GSEA (Gene Set Enrichment Analysis) and CMAP (Connectivity Map) analyses of multiple published shRNA screens, we identified a core set of pathways that affect responses to multiple drugs with diverse mechanisms of action. This suggests that these pathways represent "weak points" or "Achilles heels", whose mild disturbance should make cancer cells vulnerable to a variety of treatments.

Neuroinflammation in Age-Related Neurodegenerative Diseases: Role of Mitochondrial Oxidative Stress.

A shared hallmark of age-related neurodegenerative diseases is the chronic activation of innate immune cells, which actively contributes to the neurodegenerative process. In Alzheimer's disease, this inflammatory milieu exacerbates both amyloid and tau pathology. A similar abnormal inflammatory response has been reported in Parkinson's disease, with elevated levels of cytokines and other inflammatory intermediates derived from activated glial cells, which promote the progressive loss of nigral dopaminergic neurons.