Publications by authors named "R Ripa"
Article Synopsis
- Recent advancements in aging research and drug discovery connect basic research with clinical applications, aiming to promote healthy longevity in humans.* -
- The Aging Research and Drug Discovery Meeting in 2023 highlighted key areas such as AI, biomarkers, geroscience, and clinical trials focused on enhancing healthspan.* -
- The meeting emphasized the importance of combining generative AI with innovative biological technologies to tackle age-related diseases and extend healthy lifespans.*
A pivotal animal model for development of anticancer molecules is mice with subcutaneous tumors, grown by injection of xenografted tumor cells, where micro-Computed Tomography (µCT) of the mice is used to analyze the efficacy of the anticancer molecule. Manual delineation of the tumor region is necessary for the analysis, which is time-consuming and inconsistent, highlighting the need for automatic segmentation (AS) tools. This study introduces a preclinical µCT database, comprising 452 whole-body scans from 223 individual mice with subcutaneous tumors, spanning ten diverse µCT datasets conducted between 2014 and 2020 on a preclinical PET/CT scanner, making it the hitherto largest dataset of its kind.
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- Infective endocarditis (IE) is a severe condition that can be fatal, particularly in patients with prosthetic valves. The study evaluates the effectiveness of a new PET tracer, [Cu]Cu-DOTATATE, for diagnosing IE.
- The case series highlights two patients: Patient 1, with a mitral valve prosthesis, showed positive tracer uptake at the infection site and had a successful surgery, while Patient 2, with an aortic valve infection, showed no uptake and experienced complications leading to death.
- This research suggests the potential diagnostic value of [Cu]Cu-DOTATATE for IE but also indicates variability in its effectiveness based on the type of valve involved.
Doxorubicin (DOX) is a common and highly effective chemotherapeutic. However, its use is limited by cardiotoxic effects and the lack of methods to detect these at early time points. In the present study, we evaluated if [Cu]Cu-NODAGA-E[(cRGDyK)]2 positron emission tomography-computed tomography ([Cu]Cu-RGD PET/CT) could detect cardiotoxicity in a rat model of DOX-induced heart failure.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPlastomes are used in phylogenetic reconstructions because of their relatively conserved nature. Nonetheless, some limitations arise, particularly at lower taxonomic levels due to reduced interspecific polymorphisms and frequent hybridization events that result in unsolved phylogenies including polytomies and reticulate evolutionary patterns. Next-generation sequencing technologies allow access to genomic data and strongly supported phylogenies, yet biased topologies may be obtained due to insufficient taxon sampling.
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