CD248 Cleaved Form in Human Colorectal Cancer Stroma: Implications for Tumor Behavior and Prognosis.

CD248 (endosialin/tumor endothelial marker 1) is upregulated in cancer, including colorectal cancer (CRC), but its exact role in tumor progression remains to be elucidated. Previous studies have shown that the extracellular domain of CD248 mediates the interaction between tumor cells and extracellular matrix proteins and that interfering with this interaction may reduce tumor invasion and migration activities. We have examined the expression of CD248 in 117 human CRC samples by immunohistochemistry and investigated the association with various clinicopathologic features, including the occurrence of metastasis, intratumoral immune cell density and overall survival.

Malaria treatment for prevention: a modelling study of the impact of routine case management on malaria prevalence and burden.

Background: Testing and treating symptomatic malaria cases is crucial for case management, but it may also prevent future illness by reducing mean infection duration. Measuring the impact of effective treatment on burden and transmission via field studies or routine surveillance systems is difficult and potentially unethical. This project uses mathematical modeling to explore how increasing treatment of symptomatic cases impacts malaria prevalence and incidence.

AnophelesModel: An R package to interface mosquito bionomics, human exposure and intervention effects with models of malaria intervention impact.

In recent decades, field and semi-field studies of malaria transmission have gathered geographic-specific information about mosquito ecology, behaviour and their sensitivity to interventions. Mathematical models of malaria transmission can incorporate such data to infer the likely impact of vector control interventions and hence guide malaria control strategies in various geographies. To facilitate this process and make model predictions of intervention impact available for different geographical regions, we developed AnophelesModel.

Quantifying the impact of interventions against Plasmodium vivax: A model for country-specific use.

In order to evaluate the impact of various intervention strategies on Plasmodium vivax dynamics in low endemicity settings without significant seasonal pattern, we introduce a simple mathematical model that can be easily adapted to reported case numbers similar to that collected by surveillance systems in various countries. The model includes case management, vector control, mass drug administration and reactive case detection interventions and is implemented in both deterministic and stochastic frameworks. It is available as an R package to enable users to calibrate and simulate it with their own data.

Spatio-temporal modelling of routine health facility data for malaria risk micro-stratification in mainland Tanzania.

As malaria transmission declines, the need to monitor the heterogeneity of malaria risk at finer scales becomes critical to guide community-based targeted interventions. Although routine health facility (HF) data can provide epidemiological evidence at high spatial and temporal resolution, its incomplete nature of information can result in lower administrative units without empirical data. To overcome geographic sparsity of data and its representativeness, geo-spatial models can leverage routine information to predict risk in un-represented areas as well as estimate uncertainty of predictions.