Resolution of Historically Discordant Ames Test Negative / Rodent Carcinogenicity Positive N-nitrosamines using a Sensitive, OECD-aligned Design.

The in vitro Bacterial Reverse Mutation (Ames) Test is crucial for evaluating the mutagenicity of pharmaceutical impurities. For N-nitrosamines (NAs) historical data indicated that for certain members of this chemical class the outcomes of the Ames Test did not correlate with their associated rodent carcinogenicity outcomes. This has resulted in negative outcomes in an OECD aligned Ames Test alone (standard or enhanced) no longer being considered sufficient by regulatory authorities to assess potential carcinogenic risk of NAs if present as impurities in drug products.

Sleep Apnea Prediction Using Deep Learning.

Obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) is a sleep disorder that causes partial or complete cessation of breathing during an individual's sleep. Various methods have been proposed to automatically detect OSA events, but little work has focused on predicting such events in advance, which is useful for the development of devices that regulate breathing during a patient's sleep. We propose four methods for sleep apnea prediction based on convolutional and long short-term memory neural networks (1D-CNN, ConvLSTM, 1D-CNN-LSTM and 2D-CNN-LSTM), which use raw data from three respiratory signals (nasal flow, abdominal and thoracic) sampled at 32 Hz, without any human-engineered features.

Relating Conformational Equilibria to Conformer-Specific Lipophilicities: New Opportunities in Drug Discovery.

Efficient drug discovery is based on a concerted effort in optimizing bioactivity and compound properties such as lipophilicity, and is guided by efficiency metrics that reflect both aspects. While conformation-activity relationships and ligand conformational control are known strategies to improve bioactivity, the use of conformer-specific lipophilicities (logp) is much less explored. Here we show how conformer-specific logp values can be obtained from knowledge of the macroscopic logP value, and of the equilibrium constants between the individual species in water and in octanol.

Managing a rare complication of HELLP syndrome in Australia: Spontaneous liver haematoma in pregnancy.

Spontaneous subcapsular haematoma of the liver is a rare but life-threatening complication of pregnancy. Prevention of maternal and fetal death requires early identification and specialised management. We report three cases of spontaneous liver haematoma in pregnancy from our institution between 2011 and 2018.

Experiments with a prototype titanium hot cavity surface ionization source intended for electromagnetic separation of radioactive samarium and other lanthanide elements.

This paper reports experimental results of a prototype titanium surface ionization source. For the first time, a lanthanide ion beam has been produced with a surface ionizer composed completely of titanium metal. Titanium does not readily activate with neutron irradiation.