Impact of familiarity with the format of the exam on performance in the OSCE of undergraduate medical students - an interventional study.

Background: Assessments, such as summative structured examinations, aim to verify whether students have acquired the necessary competencies. It is important to familiarize students with the examination format prior to the assessment to ensure that true competency is measured. However, it is unclear whether students can demonstrate their true potential or possibly perform less effectively due to the unfamiliar examination format.

3D-cultivation of NSCLC cell lines induce gene expression alterations of key cancer-associated pathways and mimic conditions.

This work evaluated gene expression differences between a hanging-drop 3D NSCLC model and 2D cell cultures and their relevance by comparison to patient-derived data from The Cancer Genome Atlas. Gene expression of 2D and 3D cultures for Colo699 and A549 were assessed using Affymetrix HuGene 1.0 ST gene chips.

The influence of stromal cells and tumor-microenvironment-derived cytokines and chemokines on CD3CD8 tumor infiltrating lymphocyte subpopulations.

The tumor microenvironment has been identified as a major mediator of immunological processes in solid tumors. In particular, tumor-associated fibroblasts are known to interact with tumor infiltrating immune cells. We describe the influence of fibroblasts and tumor-microenvironment-derived cytokines on the infiltration capacity of CD3CD8 cytotoxic T lymphocyte subpopulations using a multicellular 3D co-culture system.