Targeting PARP-1 with metronomic therapy modulates MDSC suppressive function and enhances anti-PD-1 immunotherapy in colon cancer.

Background: Poly(ADP-ribose) polymerase (PARP) inhibitors (eg, olaparib) are effective against BRCA-mutated cancers at/near maximum tolerated doses by trapping PARP-1 on damaged chromatin, benefitting only small patient proportions. The benefits of targeting non-DNA repair aspects of PARP with metronomic doses remain unexplored.

Methods: Colon epithelial cells or mouse or human bone marrow (BM)-derived-myeloid-derived suppressor cells (MDSCs) were stimulated to assess the effect of partial PARP-1 inhibition on inflammatory gene expression or immune suppression.

Patch-based generative adversarial neural network models for head and neck MR-only planning.

Purpose: To evaluate pix2pix and CycleGAN and to assess the effects of multiple combination strategies on accuracy for patch-based synthetic computed tomography (sCT) generation for magnetic resonance (MR)-only treatment planning in head and neck (HN) cancer patients.

Materials And Methods: Twenty-three deformably registered pairs of CT and mDixon FFE MR datasets from HN cancer patients treated at our institution were retrospectively analyzed to evaluate patch-based sCT accuracy via the pix2pix and CycleGAN models. To test effects of overlapping sCT patches on estimations, we (a) trained the models for three orthogonal views to observe the effects of spatial context, (b) we increased effective set size by using per-epoch data augmentation, and (c) we evaluated the performance of three different approaches for combining overlapping Hounsfield unit (HU) estimations for varied patch overlap parameters.

Sulfated non-anticoagulant heparin blocks Th2-induced asthma by modulating the IL-4/signal transducer and activator of transcription 6/Janus kinase 1 pathway.

Background: The efficacy of heparins and low-MW-heparins (LMWH) against human asthma has been known for decades. However, the clinical utility of these compounds has been hampered by their anticoagulant properties. Much effort has been put into harnessing the anti-inflammatory properties of LMWH but none have been used as therapy for asthma.

ApoE deficiency promotes colon inflammation and enhances inflammatory potential oxidized-LDL and TNF-α in colon epithelial cells.

Although deficiency in Apolipoprotein E (ApoE) is linked to many diseases, its effect on colon homeostasis remains unknown.  ApoE appears to control inflammation by regulating NF-kB.  This study was designed to examine whether ApoE deficiency affects factors of colon integrity in vivo and given the likelihood that ApoE deficiency increases oxidized lipids and TNF-α, this study also examined whether such deficiency enhances the inflammatory potential of oxidized-LDL (oxLDL) and TNF-α, in colon epithelial cells in vitro   Here we show that ApoE deficiency is associated with chronic inflammation systemically and in colonic tissues as assessed by TNF-α levels.