Remodeling of Intrahepatic Ducts in a Model of Caroli Syndrome: Is Scar Carcinoma a Consequence of Laplace's Law?

Caroli syndrome, characterized by saccular dilatation of intrahepatic ducts and congenital hepatic fibrosis, is without therapy in part due to its ultra-rare prevalence and the apparent lack of availability of a suitable experimental model. While the PCK rat has long been used as a model of fibropolycystic kidney disease, hepatobiliary biophysics in this animal model is incompletely characterized. Compared to age-matched, wild-type controls, the PCK rat demonstrated severe hepatomegaly and large saccular dilated intrahepatic ducts.

Deep Learning in Drug Discovery and Medicine; Scratching the Surface.

The practice of medicine is ever evolving. Diagnosing disease, which is often the first step in a cure, has seen a sea change from the discerning hands of the neighborhood physician to the use of sophisticated machines to use of information gleaned from biomarkers obtained by the most minimally invasive of means. The last 100 or so years have borne witness to the enormous success story of allopathy, a practice that found favor over earlier practices of medical purgatory and homeopathy.

Supervised learning reveals circulating biomarker levels diagnostic of hepatocellular carcinoma in a clinically relevant model of non-alcoholic steatohepatitis; An OAD to NASH.

Although cirrhosis is a key risk factor for the development of hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC), mounting evidence indicates that in a subset of patients presenting with non-alcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH) HCC manifests in the absence of cirrhosis. Given the sheer size of the ongoing non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) epidemic and the dismal prognosis associated with late-stage primary liver cancer there is an urgent need for HCC surveillance in the NASH population. Using serum levels of HCC biomarkers as vectors and biopsy-proven HCC or no HCC as outputs / binary classifier, a supervised learning campaign was undertaken to develop a minimally invasive technique for making a diagnosis of HCC in a clinically relevant model of NASH.

An alternative synthesis and x-ray crystallographic confirmation of (-)-stepholidine.

A formal enantioselective synthesis of (-)-stepholidine that provides an alternative preparation of key lactone intermediate is described. The stereostructure of (-)-stepholidine prepared via this method was confirmed by x-ray diffraction.