Performance of six SARS-CoV-2 RNA detection systems in symptomatic and asymptomatic pediatric and maternal patients.

This study evaluated the real-world performance of six test systems for detection of SARS-CoV-2 in 138 pediatric and 110 adult maternal patients. Nasopharyngeal swabs were tested directly using the Aptima™ SARS-CoV-2 (Aptima) and Simplexa™ COVID-19 Direct (Simplexa), and with Altona RealStar RT-PCR and CDC RT-PCR with nucleic acid extracted on the Roche MagNA Pure 96 (Altona-MP96) or bioMérieux EMAG (Altona-EMAG). Overall percent-positive and percent-negative agreements among the six test systems were, respectively: Aptima: 94.

Differing molecular pathology of pancreatic adenocarcinoma in Egyptian and United States patients.

Variations in genetic mutations in pancreatic carcinoma between different populations have not been studied extensively, especially in developing countries where pancreatic cancer is rare. We studied the molecular pathology of 44 pancreatic carcinomas from patients residing in a heavily polluted region in the Nile River delta and compared the findings with tumors from 44 United States (US) patients. We evaluated K-ras mutations in codon 12, p53 mutations in exons 5-8, and Gadd45a mutations in exons 1 and 4.