Critical shoulder angle and failure of conservative treatment in patients with atraumatic full thickness rotator cuff tears.

Background: Atraumatic full thickness rotator cuff tears (AFTRCT) are common lesions whose incidence increases with age. Physical therapy is an effective conservative treatment in these patients with a reported success rate near 85% within 12 weeks of treatment. The critical shoulder angle (CSA) is a radiographic metric that relates the glenoid inclination with the lateral extension of the acromion in the coronal plane.

Mucosal delivery of a vectored RSV vaccine is safe and elicits protective immunity in rodents and nonhuman primates.

Respiratory Syncytial Virus (RSV) is a leading cause of severe respiratory disease in infants and the elderly. No vaccine is presently available to address this major unmet medical need. We generated a new genetic vaccine based on chimpanzee Adenovirus (PanAd3-RSV) and Modified Vaccinia Ankara RSV (MVA-RSV) encoding the F, N, and M2-1 proteins of RSV, for the induction of neutralizing antibodies and broad cellular immunity.

Fusion of HCV nonstructural antigen to MHC class II-associated invariant chain enhances T-cell responses induced by vectored vaccines in nonhuman primates.

Despite viral vectors being potent inducers of antigen-specific T cells, strategies to further improve their immunogenicity are actively pursued. Of the numerous approaches investigated, fusion of the encoded antigen to major histocompatibility complex class II-associated invariant chain (Ii) has been reported to enhance CD8(+) T-cell responses. We have previously shown that adenovirus vaccine encoding nonstructural (NS) hepatitis C virus (HCV) proteins induces potent T-cell responses in humans.