A pilot protocol to assess the feasibility of a virtual multiple crossover, randomized controlled trial design using methylphenidate in mild cognitive impairment.

Background: The conventional clinical trial design in Alzheimer's disease (AD) and AD-related disorders (ADRDs) is the parallel-group randomized controlled trial. However, in heterogeneous disorders like AD/ADRDs, this design requires large sample sizes to detect meaningful effects in an "average" patient. They are very costly and, despite many attempts, have not yielded new treatments for many years.

An RNAi Screen for Genes Required for Growth of Wing Tissue.

Cell division and tissue growth must be coordinated with development. Defects in these processes are the basis for a number of diseases, including developmental malformations and cancer. We have conducted an unbiased RNAi screen for genes that are required for growth in the wing, using GAL4-inducible short hairpin RNA (shRNA) fly strains made by the Drosophila RNAi Screening Center.

A Cyclin A-Myb-MuvB-Aurora B network regulates the choice between mitotic cycles and polyploid endoreplication cycles.

Endoreplication is a cell cycle variant that entails cell growth and periodic genome duplication without cell division, and results in large, polyploid cells. Cells switch from mitotic cycles to endoreplication cycles during development, and also in response to conditional stimuli during wound healing, regeneration, aging, and cancer. In this study, we use integrated approaches in Drosophila to determine how mitotic cycles are remodeled into endoreplication cycles, and how similar this remodeling is between induced and developmental endoreplicating cells (iECs and devECs).