Publications by authors named "Simon F Merz"

Introduction: Many cancer guidelines include sentinel lymph node (SLN) staging to identify microscopic metastatic disease. Current SLN analysis of melanoma patients is effective but has the substantial drawback that only a small representative portion of the node is sampled, whereas most of the tissue is discarded. This might explain the high clinical false-negative rate of current SLN diagnosis in melanoma.

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Glutamate toxicity is a pathomechanism that contributes to neuronal cell death in a wide range of acute and chronic neurodegenerative and neuroinflammatory diseases. Activation of the N-methyl-D-aspartate (NMDA)-type glutamate receptor and breakdown of the mitochondrial membrane potential are key events during glutamate toxicity. Due to its manifold functions in nervous system physiology, however, the NMDA receptor is not well suited as a drug target.

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Progressive multi-focal leukoencephalopathy (PML) is a potentially fatal encephalitis caused by JC polyomavirus (JCV). PML principally affects people with a compromised immune system, such as patients with multiple sclerosis (MS) receiving treatment with natalizumab. However, intrathecal synthesis of lipid-reactive IgM in MS patients is associated with a markedly lower incidence of natalizumab-associated PML compared to those without this antibody repertoire.

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Article Synopsis
  • Researchers studied a 69-year-old man with a rare type of leukemia called atypical chronic myeloid leukemia (aCML) to see how his white blood cells (neutrophils) moved and worked.
  • They found that, even after treatment, his neutrophils had trouble moving properly and looked different compared to healthy cells.
  • After starting a new medicine called ruxolitinib, the shape of his neutrophils got better, but their movement didn’t improve, and they noticed a change in the type of mutations in the cells.
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A high intratumoral frequency of neutrophils is associated with poor clinical outcome in most cancer entities. It is hypothesized that immunosuppressive MDSC (myeloid-derived suppressor cell) activity of neutrophils against tumor-reactive T cells contributes to this effect. However, direct evidence for such activity in situ is lacking.

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Cardioprotection by salvage of the infarct-affected myocardium is an unmet yet highly desired therapeutic goal. To develop new dedicated therapies, experimental myocardial ischemia/reperfusion (I/R) injury would require methods to simultaneously characterize extent and localization of the damage and the ensuing inflammatory responses in whole hearts over time. Here we present a three-dimensional (3D), simultaneous quantitative investigation of key I/R injury-components by combining bleaching-augmented solvent-based non-toxic clearing (BALANCE) using ethyl cinnamate (ECi) with light sheet fluorescence microscopy.

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Objective: To study the role of α4β7 integrin for gut homing of monocytes and to explore the biological consequences of therapeutic α4β7 inhibition with regard to intestinal wound healing.

Design: We studied the expression of homing markers on monocyte subsets in the peripheral blood and on macrophage subsets in the gut of patients with IBD and controls with flow cytometry and immunohistochemistry. Integrin function was addressed with dynamic adhesion assays and in vivo gut homing assays.

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Background: Cutaneous squamous cell carcinoma (cSCC) is the second most common cutaneous cancer worldwide. Several tumour characteristics are considered to pose an elevated risk for systemic spread of carcinoma cells ('high-risk' features). Early detection of subclinical metastases could permit early treatment and improve overall survival.

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