Ramelteon for Prevention of Postoperative Delirium: A Randomized Controlled Trial in Patients Undergoing Elective Pulmonary Thromboendarterectomy.

Objectives: To assess the efficacy of ramelteon in preventing delirium, an acute neuropsychiatric condition associated with increased morbidity and mortality, in the perioperative, ICU setting.

Design: Parallel-arm, randomized, double-blinded, placebo-controlled trial.

Setting: Academic medical center in La Jolla, California.

Amphiphilic suramin dissolves Matrigel, causing an 'inhibition' artefact within in vitro angiogenesis assays.

The field of study concerning promotion and/or inhibition of angiogenesis has gathered much attention in the scientific community. A great deal of work has been invested towards defining reproducible assays to gauge for promotion or inhibition of angiogenesis in response to drug treatments or growth conditions. Two common components of these assays were noted by our group to have an unexpected and previously unreported interaction.

Differential phosphorylation of perilipin 1A at the initiation of lipolysis revealed by novel monoclonal antibodies and high content analysis.

Lipolysis in adipocytes is regulated by phosphorylation of lipid droplet-associated proteins, including perilipin 1A and hormone-sensitive lipase (HSL). Perilipin 1A is potentially phosphorylated by cAMP(adenosine 3',5'-cyclic monophosphate)-dependent protein kinase (PKA) on several sites, including conserved C-terminal residues, serine 497 (PKA-site 5) and serine 522 (PKA-site 6). To characterize perilipin 1A phosphorylation, novel monoclonal antibodies were developed, which selectively recognize perilipin 1A phosphorylation at PKA-site 5 and PKA-site 6.

Characterization of a novel angiogenic model based on stable, fluorescently labelled endothelial cell lines amenable to scale-up for high content screening.

Background: Blood vessel formation is important for many physiological and pathological processes and is therefore a critical target for drug development. Inhibiting angiogenesis to starve a tumour or promoting 'normalization' of tumour vasculature in order to facilitate delivery of anticancer drugs are both areas of active research. Recapitulation of vessel formation by human cells in vitro allows the investigation of cell-cell and cell-matrix interactions in a controlled environment and is therefore a crucial step in developing HCS (high content screening) and HTS (high throughput screening) assays to search for modulators of blood vessel formation.