Phase 3 Safety and Immunogenicity Study of a Three-dose Series of Twenty-valent Pneumococcal Conjugate Vaccine in Healthy Infants and Toddlers.

Background: Global pediatric immunization programs with pneumococcal conjugate vaccines (PCVs) have reduced vaccine-type pneumococcal disease, but a substantial disease burden of non-PCV serotypes remains.

Methods: This phase 3, randomized (1:1), double-blind study evaluated safety and immunogenicity of 20-valent PCV (PCV20) relative to 13-valent PCV (PCV13) in healthy infants. Participants received 2 infant doses and a toddler dose of PCV20 or PCV13, with diphtheria-tetanus-acellular pertussis combination vaccine at all doses and measles, mumps, rubella and varicella vaccines at the toddler dose.

The H2Bub1-deposition complex is required for human and mouse cardiogenesis.

De novo variants affecting monoubiquitylation of histone H2B (H2Bub1) are enriched in human congenital heart disease. H2Bub1 is required in stem cell differentiation, cilia function, post-natal cardiomyocyte maturation and transcriptional elongation. However, how H2Bub1 affects cardiogenesis is unknown.

ORFans in Mitochondrial Genomes of Marine Polychaete Polydora.

Most characterized metazoan mitochondrial genomes are compact and encode a small set of proteins that are essential for oxidative phosphorylation, as well as rRNA and tRNA for their expression. However, in rare cases, invertebrate taxa have additional open reading frames (ORFs) in their mtDNA sequences. Here, we sequenced and analyzed the mitochondrial genome of a polychaete worm, Polydora cf.

Silver-Based Dressings in the Prevention of the Incisional Surgical Site Infection: A Prospective Multicenter Observational Controlled Trial.

A new silver-based dressing has been designed to reduce surgical sited infections. A prospective multicenter observational study was conducted from January 2020 to October 2021. Patients with and without silver-based dressing after surgical incision were observed and their data analyzed.

A mathematical model of COVID-19 transmission.

Disease transmission is studied through disciplines like epidemiology, applied mathematics, and statistics. Mathematical simulation models for transmission have implications in solving public and personal health challenges. The SIR model uses a compartmental approach including dynamic and nonlinear behavior of transmission through three factors: susceptible, infected, and removed (recovered and deceased) individuals.

Safety and Immunogenicity of a 20-valent Pneumococcal Conjugate Vaccine in Healthy Infants in the United States.

Background: The development and widespread use of pneumococcal conjugate vaccines (PCVs) substantially reduced the global burden of pneumococcal disease. Expanding the serotypes covered by PCVs may further reduce disease burden. A 20-valent PCV (PCV20) has been developed to add coverage for 7 additional serotypes (8, 10A, 11A, 12F, 15B, 22F and 33F) to those in the existing 13-valent PCV (PCV13).

Chronic total occlusion percutaneous coronary intervention in everyday clinical practice - an expert opinion of the Association of Cardiovascular Interventions of the Polish Cardiac Society.

Coronary chronic total occlusions (CTO) are increasingly encountered during invasive and non-invasive coronary angiography and remain the most challenging lesions for percutaneous revascularization. During recent years success rates and safety outcomes of CTO percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) have substantially improved, particularly due to the introduction of new techniques and dedicated equipment as well as specialized training programs of CTO operators. Significantly, the steady advances in CTO PCI techniques have coincided with the new data from randomized clinical trials supporting the role of percutaneous recanalization of CTO in relieving angina and improving the quality of life.

A new silver dressing, StopBac, used in the prevention of surgical site infections.

Ideal dressings of surgical wounds should provide moist, semi-permeable, and antiseptic environments for optimal wound healing. To maximise patient comfort, surgical dressings must be hypoallergenic, not restrict movement, and allow patients to manage their personal hygiene. From the aspect of health care personnel, dressings should enable visual monitoring of the wound without the need for removing them, thus reducing the number of dressing changes.

Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP)-Based Aggregation Mechanism for Resilience Measurement: NATO Aggregated Resilience Decision Support Model.

Resilience is a complex system that represents dynamic behaviours through its complicated structure with various nodes, interrelations, and information flows. Like other international organizations NATO has also been dealing with the measurement of this complex phenomenon in order to have a comprehensive understanding of the civil environment and its impact on military operations. With this ultimate purpose, NATO had developed and executed a prototype model with the system dynamics modelling and simulation paradigm.

Computer Assisted Wargame for Military Capability-Based Planning.

Capability-based planning as an approach to defense planning is an almost infinitely complex engineered system with countless nodes and layers of interdependency, influenced by state and non-state diplomatic activities, information, military and economic actions creating secondary and third order effects. The main output of capability-based planning is the set of capability requirements needed to achieve the expected end-state. One revitalized qualitative technique that allows us to gain insights into unstructured and fuzzy problems in the military is wargaming-in its simplest form this involves manual wargaming.

Optimization of the Casualties' Treatment Process: Blended Military Experiment.

At the battalion level, NATO ROLE1 medical treatment command focuses on the provision of primary health care being the very first physician and higher medical equipment intervention for casualty treatments. ROLE1 has paramount importance in casualty reductions, representing a complex system in current operations. This study deals with an experiment on the optimization of ROLE1 according to the key parameters of the numbers of physicians, the number of ambulances and the distance between ROLE1 and the current battlefield.

Collective Perception Using UAVs: Autonomous Aerial Reconnaissance in a Complex Urban Environment.

This article examines autonomous reconnaissance in a complex urban environment using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). Environments with many buildings and other types of obstacles and/or an uneven terrain are harder to be explored as occlusion of objects of interest may often occur. First, in this article, the problem of autonomous reconnaissance in a complex urban environment via a swarm of UAVs is formulated.

Cooperative Unmanned Aerial System Reconnaissance in a Complex Urban Environment and Uneven Terrain.

Using unmanned robotic systems in military operations such as reconnaissance or surveillance, as well as in many civil applications, is common practice. In this article, the problem of monitoring the specified area of interest by a fleet of unmanned aerial systems is examined. The monitoring is planned via the Cooperative Aerial Model, which deploys a number of waypoints in the area; these waypoints are visited successively by unmanned systems.

Trajectory Optimization in a Cooperative Aerial Reconnaissance Model.

In recent years, the use of modern technology in military operations has become standard practice. Unmanned systems play an important role in operations such as reconnaissance and surveillance. This article examines a model for planning aerial reconnaissance using a fleet of mutually cooperating unmanned aerial vehicles to increase the effectiveness of the task.

Role of thiamine in Huntington's disease pathogenesis: In vitro studies.

Background: Oxidative stress accompanies neurodegeneration and also causes abnormalities in thiaminedependent processes. These processes have been reported to be diminished in the brains of patients with several neurodegenerative diseases.

Objectives: The aim of this work was to conduct a comparative analysis of the impact of supplemented thiamine on the viability of human B lymphocytes with CAG abnormal expanded huntingtin gene (mHTT) (GM13509) and control, B lymphocytes without mHTT (GM14467) through the following studies: determination of the supplemented thiamine concentrations, which are effective for cell growth stimulation after incubation in thiamine deficit conditions; determination of cell capability to intake the exogenous thiamine; evaluation of exogenous thiamine influence on the profile of the genes related to thiamine and energy metabolism; determination of ATP synthesis and activities of thiamine-dependent enzymes, KGDHC and BCKDHC in the intact cells and upon the exogenous thiamine.

Up-regulation of glutathione-related genes, enzyme activities and transport proteins in human cervical cancer cells treated with doxorubicin.

Doxorubicin (DOX), one of the most effective anticancer drugs, acts in a variety of ways including DNA damage, enzyme inhibition and generation of reactive oxygen species. Glutathione (GSH) and glutathione-related enzymes including: glutathione peroxidase (GPX), glutathione reductase (GSR) and glutathione S-transferases (GST) may play a role in adaptive detoxification processes in response to the oxidative stress, thus contributing to drug resistance phenotype. In this study, we investigated effects of DOX treatment on expression and activity of GSH-related enzymes and multidrug resistance-associated proteins in cultured human cervical cancer cells displaying different resistance against this drug (HeLa and KB-V1).

Intracellular glutathione level and efflux in human melanoma and cervical cancer cells differing in doxorubicin resistance.

Introduction: Drug resistance continues to be a major problem in cancer treatment. Occurrence of this phenomenon is often associated with altered levels of glutathione (GSH) and GSH-related enzymes. The aim of the study was to evaluate the possible involvement of GSH and GSH-related enzymes in doxorubicin (DOX) resistance in two types of cancer cells of different etiology, from both parental and DOX-resistant sublines.

Percutaneous recanalisation of chronically occluded coronary arteries with the CrossBoss/Stingray system: first experience (report of three cases).

Background And Aim: Percutaneous coronary interventions (PCI) within chronically occluded coronary arteries remain challenging procedures with a lower success rate compared to classic PCI. However, over the last years we have witnessed many technological advances in the treatment of chronic total occlusion (CTO) including new wires, retrograde approach, subintimal tracking and re-entry technique, all underlying which the current success rate of up to 95% in dedicated centres. Subintimal space wire penetration is no longer a problem that would require terminating the procedure.

Bilateral coronary artery to pulmonary trunk fistulae detected by coronary angiography and evaluated by ECG-gated SPECT myocardial perfusion imaging: report of two cases.

Coronary artery fistulae (CAF) are anomalies related to coronary artery abnormal termination. This is a very rare congenital malformation accounting for about 0.2-0.

Association between gait variability and brain ventricle attributes: a brain mapping study.

Background: It remains unknown which brain regions are involved in the maintenance of gait dynamic stability in older adults, as characterized by a low stride time variability. Expansion of lateral cerebral ventricles is an indirect marker of adjacent brain tissue volume. The purpose of this study was to examine the association between stride time variability and the volume of sub-regions of the lateral cerebral ventricles among older community-dwellers.

Automated algorithm to measure changes in medial temporal lobe volume in Alzheimer disease.

Background: The change in volume of anatomic structures is as a sensitive indicator of Alzheimer disease (AD) progression. Although several methods are available to measure brain volumes, improvements in speed and automation are required. Our objective was to develop a fully automated, fast, and reliable approach to measure change in medial temporal lobe (MTL) volume, including primarily hippocampus.