Are we still on the right path(way)?: the altered expression of the pentose phosphate pathway in solid tumors and the potential of its inhibition in combination therapy.

Introduction: The pentose phosphate pathway (PPP) branches from glycolysis and is crucial for cell growth, since it provides necessary compounds for anabolic reactions, nucleotide synthesis, and detoxification of reactive-oxygen-species (ROS). Overexpression of PPP enzymes has been reported in multiple cancer types and linked to therapy resistance, making their inhibition interesting targets for anti-cancer therapies.

Areas Covered: This review summarizes the extent of PPP upregulation across different cancer types, and the non-metabolic functions that PPP-enzymes might contribute to cancer initiation and maintenance.

Automated recognition of functioning, activity and participation in COVID-19 from electronic patient records by natural language processing: a proof- of- concept.

Purpose: To address the feasibility, reliability and internal validity of natural language processing (NLP) for automated functional assessment of hospitalised COVID-19 patients in key International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF) categories and levels from unstructured text in electronic health records (EHR) from a large teaching hospital.

Materials And Methods: Eight human annotators assigned four ICF categories to relevant sentences: Emotional functions, Exercise tolerance, Walking and Moving, Work and Employment and their ICF levels (Functional Ambulation Categories for Walking and Moving, metabolic equivalents for Exercise tolerance). A linguistic neural network-based model was trained on 80% of the annotated sentences; inter-annotator agreement (IAA, Cohen's kappa), a weighted score of precision and recall (F1) and RMSE for level detection were assessed for the remaining 20%.