The virtues of the virtual medical school interview.

The COVID-19 pandemic has mandated the use of virtual interactions in medical school. Although this falls mainly in the area of didactic instruction, of necessity, it has extended to the critical Admissions Process and the Medical School Interview itself. The California University of Science and Medicine (CUSM) with their flipped classroom approach had previously entered a virtual space of instruction even before COVID-19.

Use of constitutive and inducible oncogene-containing iPSCs as surrogates for transgenic mice to study breast oncogenesis.

Background: Powerful constitutive and inducible transgenic / bitransgenic / tritransgenic murine models of breast cancer have been used over the past two decades to shed light on the molecular mechanisms by which the given transgenic oncogenes have interacted with other cellular genes and set in motion breast cancer initiation and progression. However, these transgenic models, as in vivo models only, are expensive and restrictive in the opportunities they provide to manipulate the experimental variables that would enable a better understanding of the molecular events related to initial transformation and the target cell being transformed.

Methods: To overcome some of these limitations, we derived oncogene-containing induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC) clones from tail vein fibroblasts of these transgenic mice and manipulated them both in vitro and in vivo in non-transgenic background mice.

Why is cancer so common a disease in people yet so rare at a cellular level?

Cancers are common diseases in people and yet, on a cellular level, are quite rare. The vast majority of both sporadic, spontaneous cancers and inherited germline cancers arise in single foci from singly transformed cells despite the fact that, in the former, carcinogenic factors bathe fields of millions of potential target cells and, in the latter, the predisposing germline mutations are present in every cell of a given organ and, in fact, every cell of the body. Although the multi-hit theory of carcinogenesis has been invoked to explain such things as cancer latency, which is the period between cancer initiation and emergence and the cancer-aging relationship where an accumulation of "hits" over a period of time are necessary for cancer emergence, the multi-hit theory falls short in explaining the rareness of transformation at a cellular level.

Regulation of breast cancer oncogenesis by the cell of origin's differentiation state.

Human breast cancer which affects 1/8 women is rare at a cellular level. Even in the setting of germline BRCA1/BRCA2, which is present in all breast cells, solitary cancers or cancers arising at only several foci occur. The overwhelming majority of breast cells (10-10 cells) resist transformation.

Does wastewater treatment plant upgrading with activated carbon result in an improvement of fish health?

In the present study, the efficiency of a wastewater treatment plant (WWTP) upgraded with a powdered activated carbon unit for the reduction of micropollutants and the related advantages for fish health have been analyzed by means of different biomarkers, i.e. histopathological investigations, analyses of glycogen content and stress proteins, as well as by chemical analyses in different matrices.