Understanding who is and isn't involved and engaged in health research: capturing and analysing demographic data to diversify patient and public involvement and engagement.

Background: Patient and public involvement and engagement (PPIE) can improve the relevance, quality, ethics and impact of research thus contributing to high quality research. Currently in the UK, people who get involved in research tend to be aged 61 years or above, White and female. Calls for greater diversity and inclusion in PPIE have become more urgent especially since the COVID-19 pandemic, so that research can better address health inequalities and be relevant for all sectors of society.

Innovating public engagement and patient involvement through strategic collaboration and practice.

Background: Patient and public involvement and engagement is an important and expected component of health-related research activity in the UK. Specifically within the health research sphere, public engagement (usually defined as raising awareness of research) and patient involvement (usually defined as actively involving people in research) have traditionally been seen as separate but have much to gain from working together towards a common goal of better health outcomes for all.

Methods: This paper describes a unique approach taken by the Public Programmes Team: a small interdisciplinary team of public engagement specialists, with backgrounds in science, community development, public engagement and involvement, policy, ethics, communications, industry, museums and creative practice, embedded within translational research infrastructure and delivery in Manchester in the North West of England.

MHC matching fails to prevent long-term rejection of iPSC-derived neurons in non-human primates.

Cell therapy products (CTP) derived from pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) may constitute a renewable, specifically differentiated source of cells to potentially cure patients with neurodegenerative disorders. However, the immunogenicity of CTP remains a major issue for therapeutic approaches based on transplantation of non-autologous stem cell-derived neural grafts. Despite its considerable side-effects, long-term immunosuppression, appears indispensable to mitigate neuro-inflammation and prevent rejection of allogeneic CTP.

Longitudinal characterization of cognitive and motor deficits in an excitotoxic lesion model of striatal dysfunction in non-human primates.

As research progresses in the understanding of the molecular and cellular mechanisms underlying neurodegenerative diseases like Huntington's disease (HD) and expands towards preclinical work for the development of new therapies, highly relevant animal models are increasingly needed to test new hypotheses and to validate new therapeutic approaches. In this light, we characterized an excitotoxic lesion model of striatal dysfunction in non-human primates (NHPs) using cognitive and motor behaviour assessment as well as functional imaging and post-mortem anatomical analyses. NHPs received intra-striatal stereotaxic injections of quinolinic acid bilaterally in the caudate nucleus and unilaterally in the left sensorimotor putamen.

A validation dataset for Macaque brain MRI segmentation.

Validation data for segmentation algorithms dedicated to preclinical images is fiercely lacking, especially when compared to the large number of databases of Human brain images and segmentations available to the academic community. Not only is such data essential for validating methods, it is also needed for objectively comparing concurrent algorithms and detect promising paths, as segmentation challenges have shown for clinical images. The dataset we present here is a first step in this direction.

Primatologist: A modular segmentation pipeline for macaque brain morphometry.

Because they bridge the genetic gap between rodents and humans, non-human primates (NHPs) play a major role in therapy development and evaluation for neurological disorders. However, translational research success from NHPs to patients requires an accurate phenotyping of the models. In patients, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) combined with automated segmentation methods has offered the unique opportunity to assess in vivo brain morphological changes.

Novel inhibitors of plasminogen activator inhibitor-1: development of new templates from diketopiperazines.

Several isoquinoline-based templates were identified from the studies of the conformational effects of the diketopiperazine structures for PAI-1 inhibition. Moderate to good activity was retained with the elimination of unattractive characteristics in the diketopiperazine template.