Astragalus polysaccharides improve adjuvant chemotherapy-induced fatigue for patients with early breast cancer.

This study aimed to evaluate the effect of Astragalus polysaccharides (PG2) on reducing chemotherapy-induced fatigue (CIF) and toxicity, thereby encouraging compliance to chemotherapy. This was a randomized, placebo-controlled, phase 2 study. Patients with stage II/III early breast cancer planning to undergo adjuvant anthracycline-based chemotherapy were randomly assigned to receive PG2 500 mg or placebo on days 1, 3, and 8 every 21 days.

Rapid determination of plasma vigabatrin by LC-ESI-MS/MS supporting therapeutic drug monitoring in children with infantile spasms.

Vigabatrin is one of the second-generation anti-seizure medications (ASMs) designated orphan drugs by the FDA for monotherapy for pediatric patients with infantile spasms from 1 month to 2 years of age. Vigabatrin is also indicated as the adjunctive therapy for adults and pediatric patients 10 years of age and older with refractory complex partial seizures. Ideally, the vigabatrin treatment entails achieving complete seizure freedom without significant adverse effects, and the therapeutic drug monitoring (TDM) will make a significant contribution to this aim, which provides a pragmatic approach to such epilepsy care in that the dose tailoring can be undertaken for uncontrollable seizures and in cases of clinical toxicity guided by the drug concentrations.

Synthesis and bioevaluation of diaryl urea derivatives as potential antitumor agents for the treatment of human colorectal cancer.

The development of inhibitors targeting the PI3K-Akt-mTOR signaling pathway has been greatly hindered by the on-target AEs, such as hyperglycemia and hepatotoxicities. In this study, a series of diaryl urea derivatives has been designed and synthesized based on clinical candidate gedatolisib (6aa), and most of the newly synthesized derivatives showed kinase inhibitory and antiproliferative activities within nanomolar and submicromolar level, respectively. The terminal l-prolineamide substituted derivative 6 ab showed 8.

iBLAST: Incremental BLAST of new sequences via automated e-value correction.

Search results from local alignment search tools use statistical scores that are sensitive to the size of the database to report the quality of the result. For example, NCBI BLAST reports the best matches using similarity scores and expect values (i.e.

Long non‑coding RNA NEAT1 promotes pulmonary fibrosis by regulating the microRNA‑455‑3p/SMAD3 axis.

Pulmonary fibrosis is an excessive repair response to tissue damage, triggering hyperplasia of fibrotic connective tissues; however, there is no effective treatment in a clinical setting. The purpose of the present study was to investigate the roles of long non‑coding RNA nuclear enriched abundant transcript 1 (NEAT1) and microRNA‑455‑3p (miR‑455‑3p) were investigated in pulmonary fibrosis. In this study, the mRNA expression levels of NEAT1, miR‑455‑3p and SMAD3 in the HPAEpiC alveolar and BEAS‑2B bronchial epithelial cell lines were determined using reverse transcription‑quantitative PCR, while the markers of epithelial‑mesenchymal transformation (EMT) and collagen production were determined using western blot analysis.

Serum Sclerostin But Not DKK-1 Correlated with Central Arterial Stiffness in End Stage Renal Disease Patients.

Sclerostin and dickkopf-1 (DKK1) played a role in the development of cardiovascular diseases and arterial stiffness in chronic kidney disease (CKD) patients but with controversial results of patients in end-stage renal disease (ESRD) including hemodialysis (HD) and peritoneal dialysis (PD). This study aimed to examine the association between the mode of dialysis or the values of sclerostin or DKK1 and carotid-femoral pulse wave velocity (cfPWV) in ESRD patients. There were 122 HD and 72 PD patients enrolled in this study.

Identifying multi-hit carcinogenic gene combinations: Scaling up a weighted set cover algorithm using compressed binary matrix representation on a GPU.

Despite decades of research, effective treatments for most cancers remain elusive. One reason is that different instances of cancer result from different combinations of multiple genetic mutations (hits). Therefore, treatments that may be effective in some cases are not effective in others.

Different FDG-PET metabolic patterns of anti-AMPAR and anti-NMDAR encephalitis: Case report and literature review.

Introduction: F-fluorodeoxyglucose (FDG)-PET metabolic patterns of brain differ among autoimmune encephalitis with different neuronal surface antigens. In this case report, we compared the topographical relationship of cerebral glucose metabolism and antigen distribution in the patients with anti-NMDAR and anti-AMPAR encephalitis. Literature review summarized the common features of brain metabolism of autoimmune encephalitis.

Author Correction: Differentiating between cancer and normal tissue samples using multi-hit combinations of genetic mutations.

An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper.

Differentiating between cancer and normal tissue samples using multi-hit combinations of genetic mutations.

Cancer is known to result from a combination of a small number of genetic defects. However, the specific combinations of mutations responsible for the vast majority of cancers have not been identified. Current computational approaches focus on identifying driver genes and mutations.

Identifying Transcriptional Regulatory Modules Among Different Chromatin States in Mouse Neural Stem Cells.

Gene expression regulation is a complex process involving the interplay between transcription factors and chromatin states. Significant progress has been made toward understanding the impact of chromatin states on gene expression. Nevertheless, the mechanism of transcription factors binding combinatorially in different chromatin states to enable selective regulation of gene expression remains an interesting research area.

Hypomagnesemia and clinical benefits of anti-EGFR monoclonal antibodies in wild-type KRAS metastatic colorectal cancer: a systematic review and meta-analysis.

Hypomagnesemia is a recognized side-effect of cetuximab- or panitumumab-based chemotherapy for metastatic colorectal cancer (mCRC). The clinical relevance of hypomagnesemia is under debate. Thus, a systematic review and meta-analysis of retrospective studies and randomized clinical trials (RCTs) comparing hypomagnesemia with normal magnesium levels in wild-type KRAS mCRC was performed.

Development of a Multiplexed Liquid Chromatography Multiple-Reaction-Monitoring Mass Spectrometry (LC-MRM/MS) Method for Evaluation of Salivary Proteins as Oral Cancer Biomarkers.

Multiple (selected) reaction monitoring (MRM/SRM) of peptides is a growing technology for target protein quantification because it is more robust, precise, accurate, high-throughput, and multiplex-capable than antibody-based techniques. The technique has been applied clinically to the large-scale quantification of multiple target proteins in different types of fluids. However, previous MRM-based studies have placed less focus on sample-preparation workflow and analytical performance in the precise quantification of proteins in saliva, a noninvasively sampled body fluid.

The survival impact of delayed surgery and adjuvant chemotherapy on stage II/III rectal cancer with pathological complete response after neoadjuvant chemoradiation.

Neoadjuvant concurrent chemoradiation (CCRT) is standard treatment for clinical stage II/III rectal cancers. However, whether patients with pathological complete response (pT0N0, pCR) should receive adjuvant chemotherapy and whether delayed surgery will influence the pCR rate remains controversial. A nationwide population study was conducted using the Taiwan Cancer Registry Database from January 2007 to December 2013.

muBLASTP: database-indexed protein sequence search on multicore CPUs.

Background: The Basic Local Alignment Search Tool (BLAST) is a fundamental program in the life sciences that searches databases for sequences that are most similar to a query sequence. Currently, the BLAST algorithm utilizes a query-indexed approach. Although many approaches suggest that sequence search with a database index can achieve much higher throughput (e.

Effects of Age and Body Mass Index on Thoracolumbar Spine X-Ray for Diagnosing Osteoporosis in Elderly Women: Tianliao Old People (TOP) Study 07.

Purpose: The aim of this study was to determine the effects of diagnostic discordance with or without a thoracolumbar spine lateral view X-ray in patients with osteoporosis.

Methods: We randomly enrolled 368 women over 65 years old (74.3 ± 6.

Asthma control and severe exacerbations in patients with moderate or severe asthma in Jilin Province, China: a multicenter cross-sectional survey.

Background: No systemic evaluation of asthma control in Jilin Province has been reported. Asthma control might provide the basis for asthma management in this region. A multicenter hospital-based cross-sectional study was performed to investigate the asthma control and related factors for severe asthma exacerbations in patients with moderate or severe asthma in Jilin Province, China.

cuBLASTP: Fine-Grained Parallelization of Protein Sequence Search on CPU+GPU.

BLAST, short for Basic Local Alignment Search Tool, is a ubiquitous tool used in the life sciences for pairwise sequence search. However, with the advent of next-generation sequencing (NGS), whether at the outset or downstream from NGS, the exponential growth of sequence databases is outstripping our ability to analyze the data. While recent studies have utilized the graphics processing unit (GPU) to speedup the BLAST algorithm for searching protein sequences (i.

Efficacy and safety of bio-chemotherapy with dacarbazine plus interleukin-2 in patients with unresectable malignant melanoma.

Aim: This study retrospectively evaluated the toxicity and efficacy of dacarbazine (DTIC) with low-dose subcutaneous interleukin-2 (IL-2) for patients with advanced melanoma.

Method: Patients with unresectable malignant melanoma received bio-chemotherapy DTIC (330 mg/m(2) , every 3 weeks ) and IL-2 18 MIU (million international units) in divided doses by subcutaneous injection three times a week for 4 weeks. Treatment was performed for six cycles or until disease progression or unbearable toxicity.

The Lifespan-Promoting Effect of Otophylloside B in Caenorhabditis elegans.

Aging is the major risk factor for many human diseases and degeneration. Thus, clinically effective medicine could delay the process of aging and aging-related diseases are desperately wanted. In traditional Chinese medicine (TCM), some were claimed to slow down aging.

TSP50 depends on its threonine protease activity and its interactions with TNF-α-induced NF-κB for its role in human cervical tumorigenesis.

Testes-specific protease 50 (TSP50) has threonine activity and has homology to serine proteases. TSP50 protein, which is encoded by a possible proto-oncogene, is overexpressed in cervical tumor tissues. Through overexpression experiments using both TSP50 and a TSP50 mutant (TSP50 T310A), it is clear that this protein may play an important role in carcinogenesis and progression of cervical tumor.