Exploring red blood cells as an antigen delivery system to modulate the immune response towards FVIII in hemophilia A.

Background: The main complication in hemophilia A treatment is the development of inhibitory antibodies against factor (F)VIII. Immune tolerance induction, the gold standard for eradicating anti-FVIII antibodies, is efficient in only 60% to 80% of cases. This underscores the need for more efficient induction of tolerance in patients with hemophilia A with FVIII inhibitors.

An AI-based imaging flow cytometry approach to study erythrophagocytosis.

Erythrophagocytosis is a process consisting of recognition, engulfment and digestion by phagocytes of antibody-coated or damaged erythrocytes. Understanding the dynamics that are behind erythrophagocytosis is fundamental to comprehend this cellular process under specific circumstances. Several techniques have been used to study phagocytosis.

Production and stability of cultured red blood cells depends on the concentration of cholesterol in culture medium.

The production of cultured red blood cells (cRBC) for transfusion purposes requires large scale cultures and downstream processes to purify enucleated cRBC. The membrane composition, and cholesterol content in particular, are important during proliferation of (pro)erythroblasts and for cRBC quality. Therefore, we tested the requirement for cholesterol in the culture medium during expansion and differentiation of erythroid cultures with respect to proliferation, enucleation and purification by filtration.

Real-Time Ultrasound Guidance for Umbilical Venous Cannulation in Neonates With Congenital Heart Disease.

Objectives: Umbilical venous cannulation is the favored approach to perinatal central access worldwide but has a failure rate of 25-50% and the insertion technique has not evolved in decades. Improving the success of this procedure would have broad implications, particularly where peripherally inserted central catheters are not easily obtained and in neonates with congenital heart disease, in whom umbilical access facilitates administration of inotropes and blood products while sparing vessels essential for later cardiac interventions. We sought to use real-time, point-of-care ultrasound to achieve central umbilical venous access in patients for whom conventional, blind placement techniques had failed.

Rapid, Sensitive, and Specific Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 Detection: A Multicenter Comparison Between Standard Quantitative Reverse-Transcriptase Polymerase Chain Reaction and CRISPR-Based DETECTR.

Background: Recent advances in CRISPR-based diagnostics suggest that DETECTR, a combination of reverse-transcriptase loop-mediated isothermal amplification (RT-LAMP) and subsequent Cas12 bystander nuclease activation by amplicon-targeting ribonucleoprotein complexes, could be a faster and cheaper alternative to quantitative reverse-transcription polymerase chain reaction (qRT-PCR) without sacrificing sensitivity and/or specificity.

Methods: In this study, we compare DETECTR with qRT-PCR to diagnose coronavirus disease 2019 on 378 patient samples. Patient sample dilution assays suggest a higher analytical sensitivity of DETECTR compared with qRT-PCR; however, this was not confirmed in this large patient cohort, where we report 95% reproducibility between the 2 tests.