Identification of Patients with Advanced Fibrosis Due to Nonalcoholic Fatty Liver Disease: Considerations for Best Practice.

Nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) and nonalcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH) prevalence has increased in the past two decades, resulting in a significant but under-recognised public health burden. This impacts the prevalence of advanced fibrosis, end-stage liver disease and associated extrahepatic manifestations. To understand the challenges in recognising patients with advanced fibrosis due to NASH and develop a standardised approach to screen these patients, the authors of this document provided their opinions and expertise from practice and published evidence to identify key challenges and current approaches for diagnosing NASH.

A novel multi-modal drug repurposing approach for identification of potent ACK1 inhibitors.

Exploiting drug polypharmacology to identify novel modes of actions for drug repurposing has gained significant attentions in the current era of weak drug pipelines. From a serendipitous to systematic or rational ways, a variety of unimodal computational approaches have been developed but the complexity of the problem clearly needs multi-modal approaches for better solutions. In this study, we propose an integrative computational framework based on classical structure-based drug design and chemical-genomic similarity methods, combined with molecular graph theories for this task.

Development of structural MR brain imaging protocols to study genetics and maturation.

Structural imaging research offers excellent translational benefits when non-human primate (NHP) models are employed. In this paper, we will discuss the development of anatomical MR imaging protocols for two important applications of structural imaging in NHPs: studies of genetic variability in brain morphology and longitudinal imaging of fetal brain maturation trends. In contrast with imaging studies of adult humans, structural imaging in the NHPs is challenging due to a comparatively small brain size (2- to 200-fold smaller volume, depending on the species).

Pineal acid phosphatase activity in Syrian hamsters: sex differences and effects of castration and androgen replacement therapy.

Pineal acid phosphatase (ACP) activity was examined in seven experiments involving young intact or castrated male and female Syrian hamsters. Nine-week old female hamsters had a 3-fold (p < 0.001) higher ACP activity in their pineal glands than did males.