Impact of follow-up on generalized pairwise comparisons for estimating the irinotecan benefit in advanced/metastatic gastric cancer.

Background And Objectives: The net treatment effect (∆) is a new method to assess the treatment benefit that combines multiple time-to-event, binary and continuous endpoints according to a pre-specified sequence. It represents the net probability for a random patient treated in the experimental arm to have a better overall outcome than a random patient from the control arm does. We aimed at characterizing the impact of follow-up on ∆ estimated from both time-to-event and binary toxicity endpoints, in randomized controlled trials (RCTs) of irinotecan-based regimen in advanced/metastatic gastric cancer (AGC).

Intestinal bacterial β-glucuronidase as a possible predictive biomarker of irinotecan-induced diarrhea severity.

Irinotecan is an anticancer drug with a broad spectrum of activity, characterized by multistep and complex pharmacology. Regardless of its schedule of administration, neutropenia and delayed-type diarrhea are the most common side effects. The latter was the dose-limiting toxicity in phase I trials, and its prediction by pharmacogenetic (UGT1A1*28/*28) testing remains sub-optimal.

Raman characterization of human skin aging.

Background: Skin aging is a complex biological process mixing intrinsic and extrinsic factors, such as sun exposure. At the molecular level, skin aging affects in particular the extracellular matrix proteins.

Materials And Methods: Using Raman imaging, which is a nondestructive approach appropriate for studying biological samples, we analyzed how aging modifies the matrix proteins of the papillary and reticular dermis.