Confidence in airway management proficiency: a mixed methods study of intensive care specialists in Australia and New Zealand.

To explore self-confidence, and the respective facilitators and barriers, among intensive care specialists in Australia and New Zealand in relation to airway management. A mixed methods study. 11 intensive care units across Australia and New Zealand.

Leadership during airway management in the intensive care unit: A video-reflexive ethnography study.

Effective leadership is crucial to team performance within the intensive care unit. This novel study aimed to explore how staff members from an intensive care unit conceptualize leadership and what facilitators and barriers to leadership exist within a simulated workplace. It also aimed to identify factors that intersect with their perceptions of leadership.

The use of video laryngoscopy outside the operating room: A systematic review.

This study aimed to describe how video laryngoscopy is used outside the operating room within the hospital setting. Specifically, we aimed to summarise the evidence for the use of video laryngoscopy outside the operating room, and detail how it appears in current clinical practice guidelines. A literature search was conducted across two databases (MEDLINE and Embase), and all articles underwent screening for relevance to our aims and pre-determined exclusion criteria.

In vivo proton magnetic resonance spectroscopy of breast cancer: a review of the literature.

An emerging clinical modality called proton magnetic resonance spectroscopy ((1)H-MRS) enables the non-invasive in vivo assessment of tissue metabolism and is demonstrating applications in improving the specificity of MR breast lesion diagnosis and monitoring tumour responsiveness to neoadjuvant chemotherapies. Variations in the concentration of choline-based cellular metabolites, detectable with (1)H-MRS, have shown an association with malignant transformation of tissue in in vivo and in vitro studies. (1)H-MRS exists as an adjunct to the current routine clinical breast MR examination.

Enhanced antitumor activity induced by adoptive T-cell transfer and adjunctive use of the histone deacetylase inhibitor LAQ824.

Tumors grow in the presence of antigen-specific T cells, suggesting the existence of intrinsic cancer cell escape mechanisms. We hypothesized that a histone deacetylase (HDAC) inhibitor could sensitize tumor cells to immunotherapy because this class of agents has been reported to increase tumor antigen expression and shift gene expression to a proapoptotic milieu in cancer cells. To test this question, we treated B16 murine melanoma with the combination of the HDAC inhibitor LAQ824 and the adoptive transfer of gp100 melanoma antigen-specific pmel-1 T cells.

Immunosensitization with a Bcl-2 small molecule inhibitor.

Several tumor immunotherapy approaches result in a low percentage of durable responses in selected cancers. We hypothesized that the insensitivity of cancer cells to immunotherapy may be related to an anti-apoptotic cancer cell milieu, which could be pharmacologically reverted through the inhibition of antiapoptotic Bcl-2 family proteins in cancer cells. ABT-737, a small molecule inhibitor of the antiapoptotic proteins Bcl-2, Bcl-w and Bcl-x(L), was tested for the ability to increase antitumor immune responses in two tumor immunotherapy animal models.

Targeted therapies to improve tumor immunotherapy.

Durable tumor regression and potential cures of metastatic solid cancers can be achieved by a variety of cellular immunotherapy strategies, including cytokine therapy, dendritic cell-based vaccines, and immune-activating antibodies, when used in so-called immune-sensitive cancers such as melanoma and renal cell carcinoma. However, these immunotherapy strategies have very low tumor response rates, usually in the order of 5% to 10% of treated patients. We propose that the antitumor activity of adequately stimulated tumor antigen-specific T cells is limited by local factors within the tumor milieu and that pharmacologic modulation of this milieu may overcome tumor resistance to immunotherapy.