Molecular Profiling of Biliary Tract Cancers in African American and Caucasian Patients.

Purpose: Biliary tract cancers (BTCs) include intrahepatic cholangiocarcinoma (ICC), extrahepatic cholangiocarcinoma (ECC), and gallbladder cancers. BTCs have a number of genomic alterations, including isocitrate dehydrogenase 1 () mutations, fibroblast growth factor receptor 2 () rearrangements, and amplifications. Therapies targeting these alterations have shown clinical benefit in patients with BTCs in the United States.

Assessing Medicare's Coverage With Evidence Development Program.

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) coverage with evidence development (CED) program provides coverage for items and services not meeting Medicare's "reasonable and necessary" standard while requiring participation in clinical studies. As additional evidence is available, CMS may reconsider CED decisions. Of twenty-six items and services in the CED program since its 2005 inception, CMS has reconsidered coverage for ten (38 percent).

Minimal domain peptides derived from enterocins exhibit potent antifungal activity.

The antimicrobial peptide (AMP) circularized bacteriocin enterocin AS-48 produced by sp. exhibits broad-spectrum antibacterial activity via dimer insertion into the plasma membrane to form membrane pore structures, compromising membrane integrity and leading to bactericidal activity. A specific alpha-helical region of enterocin AS-48 has been shown to be responsible for the membrane-penetrating activity of the peptide.

Programming scheduled self-assembly of circadian materials.

Active biological molecules present a powerful, yet largely untapped, opportunity to impart autonomous regulation of materials. Because these systems can function robustly to regulate when and where chemical reactions occur, they have the ability to bring complex, life-like behavior to synthetic materials. Here, we achieve this design feat by using functionalized circadian clock proteins, KaiB and KaiC, to engineer time-dependent crosslinking of colloids.

Development of CGS-15943 Adjunctives for the Disruption of Plasmid Maintenance in Multidrug Resistant .

Carbapenemase producing (CPEs) represent a group of multidrug resistant pathogens for which few, if any, therapeutics options remain available. CPEs generally harbor plasmids that encode resistance to last resort carbapenems and many other antibiotics. We previously performed a high throughput screen to identify compounds that can disrupt the maintenance and replication of resistance conferring plasmids through use of a synthetic screening plasmid introduced into K-12 cells.