Project description:: We present Goldilocks: a Python package providing functionality for collecting summary statistics, identifying shifts in variation, discovering outlier regions and locating and extracting interesting regions from one or more arbitrary genomes for further analysis, for a user-provided definition of interesting.Goldilocks is freely available open-source software distributed under the MIT licence. Source code is hosted publicly at https://github.com/SamStudio8/goldilocks and the package may also be installed using pip install goldilocks. Documentation can be found at https://goldilocks.readthedocs.org: msn@aber.ac.ukSupplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.
Project description:The immune system is a robust and often untapped accomplice of many standard cancer therapies. A majority of tumors exist in a state of immune tolerance where the patient's immune system has become insensitive to the cancer cells. Because of its lymphodepleting effects, chemotherapy has the potential to break this tolerance. To investigate this, we created a mathematical modeling framework of tumor-immune dynamics. Our results suggest that optimal chemotherapy scheduling must balance two opposing objectives: maximizing tumor reduction while preserving patient immune function. Successful treatment requires therapy to operate in a "Goldilocks Window" where patient immune health is not overly compromised. By keeping therapy "just right," we show that the synergistic effects of immune activation and chemotherapy can maximize tumor reduction and control. SIGNIFICANCE: To maximize the synergy between chemotherapy and antitumor immune response, lymphodepleting therapy must be balanced in a "Goldilocks Window" of optimal dosing.Graphical Abstract: http://cancerres.aacrjournals.org/content/canres/79/20/5302/F1.large.jpg.
Project description:IntroductionFaculty and residents strive for appropriate autonomy and entrustment. Initial direct supervision of clinical care gradually shifts to increasing levels of resident independence over time. Faculty members are inconsistent in resident supervision leading to missed opportunities for resident independence.MethodsFamily medicine faculty workshop participants completed teaching style self-evaluations prior to discussion of clinical examples with excessive or insufficient autonomy. Participants reviewed real resident feedback examples to increase insight into teaching styles. Participants were presented with cases to discuss varying degrees of resident autonomy and entrustment. Learners committed to one specific behavior to calibrate the degree of autonomy they provide.ResultsOf the faculty, 113 members participated in the workshop with the majority (98%) finding the workshop relevant in helping them to identify strategies for reflecting on their degree of autonomy allowed and to look for appropriate situations for enhancing their resident entrustment.DiscussionThis interactive workshop provided clear ways for addressing the issue of independence versus control in supervision of patient care. It provided a feedback mechanism for educators who provide too much or too little autonomy for the best resident learning. Additionally, this conversation encouraged participants to engage in self-reflection on the autonomy given to their resident.
Project description:In the increasingly complex world of modern medicine, relationship-centered, team-based care is important in geriatric cardiology. Palliative cardiovascular care plays a central role in defining the scope and timing of medical therapies and in coordinating symptom-targeted care in line with patient wishes, values, and preferences. Palliative care addresses advance care planning, symptom relief and caregiver/family support and seeks to ameliorate all forms of suffering, including physical, psychological, and spiritual. Although palliative care grew out of the hospice movement and has traditionally been associated with care at the end of life, the current model acknowledges that palliative care can be delivered concurrent with invasive, life-prolonging interventions. As the population ages, patients with serious cardiovascular disease increasingly suffer from noncardiac, multimorbid conditions and become eligible for interventions that palliate symptoms but also prolong life. Management of implanted cardiac support devices at the end of life, whether rhythm management devices or mechanical circulatory support devices, can involve a host of complexities in decisions to deactivate, timing of deactivation and even the mechanics of deactivation. Studies on palliative care interventions have demonstrated clear improvements in quality of life and are more mixed on life prolongation and cost savings. There is and will remain a dearth of clinicians with specialist palliative care training. Therefore, cardiovascular clinicians have a role to play in provision of practical, "primary" palliative care.
Project description:Standard curative treatment of early-stage non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) involves surgery in combination with postoperative (adjuvant) platinum-based chemotherapy where indicated. Preoperative (neoadjuvant) therapies offer certain theoretical benefits compared with adjuvant approaches, including the ability to assess on-treatment response, reduce the tumor bulk prior to surgery, and enhance tolerability in the preoperative setting. Indeed, the use of neoadjuvant therapies are well established in other cancers such as breast and rectal cancers to debulk the tumor and guide ongoing therapy, and neoadjuvant chemotherapy has similar efficacy but less toxicity in NSCLC. More recently, immune checkpoint inhibitors (ICI) targeting programmed death-1 (PD1)/PD1-ligand 1 (PD-L1) have transformed the treatment of advanced NSCLC; the unique mechanisms of action of ICI offer additional rationale for assessment in the neoadjuvant setting. Preclinical studies in mouse cancer models support the proof of concept of neoadjuvant ICI (NAICI) through improvement of T-cell effector function and long-term memory induction. Preliminary early-phase human trial data support the proposition that NAICI in NSCLC may provide an feasible and potentially efficacious future treatment strategy and large, randomized phase III trials are currently recruiting to assess this approach. However, outstanding issues include defining optimal treatment combinations which balance high efficacy with acceptable toxicity, validating biomarkers to aid in patient selection, and avoiding potential pitfalls such as missing a window for successful surgery, that is, choosing the right drugs, for the right patient, at the right time. Predictive biomarkers to direct selection of therapy are required, and the validation of major pathological response (MPR) as a surrogate for survival will be important in the uptake of the neoadjuvant approach.
Project description:To examine predictors of understanding preemptive CYP2D6 pharmacogenomics test results and to identify key features required to improve future educational efforts of preemptive pharmacogenomics testing.One thousand ten participants were surveyed after receiving preemptive CYP2D6 pharmacogenomics test results.Eighty-six percent (n = 869) of patients responded. Of the responders, 98% were white and 55% were female; 57% had 4 years or more of post-secondary education and an average age of 58.9?±?5.5 years. Twenty-six percent said that they only somewhat understood their results and 7% reported they did not understand them at all. Only education predicted understanding. The most common suggestion for improvement was the use of layperson's terms when reporting results. In addition, responders suggested that results should be personalized by referring to medications that they were currently using. Of those reporting imperfect drug adherence, most (91%) reported they would be more likely to use medication as prescribed if pharmacogenomic information was used to help select the drug or dose.Despite great efforts to simplify pharmacogenomic results (or because of them), approximately one-third of responders did not understand their results. Future efforts need to provide more examples and tailor results to the individual. Incorporation of pharmacogenomics is likely to improve medication adherence.Genet Med advance online publication 05 January 2017.
Project description:Individualising biologic disease-modifying anti-rheumatic drugs (bDMARDs) to maximise outcomes and deliver safe and cost-effective care is a key goal in the management of rheumatoid arthritis (RA). Investigation to identify predictive tools of bDMARD response is a highly active and prolific area of research. In addition to clinical phenotyping, cellular and molecular characterisation of synovial tissue and blood in patients with RA, using different technologies, can facilitate predictive testing. This narrative review will summarise the literature for the available bDMARD classes and focus on where progress has been made. We will also look ahead and consider the increasing use of 'omics' technologies, the potential they hold as well as the challenges, and what is needed in the future to fully realise our ambition of personalised bDMARD treatment.
Project description:Histone proteins dynamically regulate chromatin structure and epigenetic signaling to maintain cell homeostasis. These processes require controlled spatial and temporal deposition and eviction of histones by their dedicated chaperones. With the evolution of histone variants, a network of functionally specific histone chaperones has emerged. Molecular details of the determinants of chaperone specificity for different histone variants are only slowly being resolved. A complete understanding of these processes is essential to shed light on the genuine biological roles of histone variants, their chaperones, and their impact on chromatin dynamics.
Project description:Transforming growth factor (TGF)-? antagonizes mitogenic Ras signaling during epithelial regeneration, but TGF-? and Ras act synergistically in driving tumor progression. Insights into these apparently contradictory effects have come from recent detailed analyses of the TGF-? signaling process. Here, we summarize the different modes of TGF-?/Ras signaling in normal epithelium and neoplasms and show how perturbation of TGF-? signaling by Ras may contribute to a shift from tumor-suppressive to protumorigenic TGF-? activity during tumor progression. Smad proteins, which convey signals from TGF-? receptors to the nucleus, have intermediate linker regions between conserved Mad homology (MH) 1 and MH2 domains. TGF-? Type I receptor and Ras-associated kinases differentially phosphorylate Smad2 and Smad3 to create C-terminally (C), linker (L) or dually (L/C) phosphorylated (p) isoforms. In epithelial homeostasis, TGF-?-mediated pSmad3C signaling opposes proliferative responses induced by mitogenic signals. During carcinogenesis, activation of cytoplasmic Ras-associated kinases including mitogen-activated protein kinase confers a selective advantage on benign tumors by shifting Smad3 signaling from a tumor-suppressive pSmad3C to an oncogenic pSmad3L pathway, leading to carcinoma in situ. Finally, at the edges of advanced carcinomas invading adjacent tissues, nuclear Ras-associated kinases such as cyclin-dependent kinases, together with cytoplasmic kinases, alter TGF-? signals to more invasive and proliferative pSmad2L/C and pSmad3L/C signaling. Taken together, TGF-? signaling specificity arises from spatiotemporal dynamics of Smad phosphoisoforms. Based on these findings, we have reason to hope that pharmacologic inhibition of linker phosphorylation might suppress progression to human advanced carcinomas by switching from protumorigenic to tumor-suppressive TGF-? signaling.
Project description:Development of new drugs is a time-taking and expensive process. Comprehensive efforts are being made globally toward the search of therapeutics against SARS-CoV-2. Several drugs such as remdesivir, favipiravir, ritonavir, and lopinavir have been included in the treatment regimen and shown effective results in several cases. Among the existing broad-spectrum antiviral drugs, remdesivir is found to be more effective against SARS-CoV-2. Remdesivir has broad-spectrum antiviral action against many single-stranded RNA viruses including pathogenic SARS-CoV and Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV). In this study, we proposed that remdesivir strongly binds to membrane protein (Mprotein), RNA-dependent RNA polymerase (RDRP), and main protease (Mprotease) of SARS-CoV-2. It might show antiviral activity by inhibiting more than one target. It has been found that remdesivir binds to Mprotease, Mprotein, and RDRP with -7.8, -7.4, and -7.1 kcal/mol, respectively. The structure dynamics study suggested that binding of remdesivir leads to unfolding of RDRP. It has been found that strong binding of remdesivir to Mprotein leads to decrease in structural deviations and gyrations. Additionally, the average solvent-accessible surface area of Mprotein decreases from 127.17 to 112.12 nm2, respectively. Furthermore, the eigenvalues and the trace of the covariance matrix were found to be low in case of Mprotease-remdesivir, Mprotein-remdesivir, and RDRP-remdesivir. Binding of remdesivir to Mprotease, Mprotein, and RDRP reduces the average motions in protein due to its strong binding. The MMPBSA calculations also suggested that remdesivir has strong binding affinity with Mprotein, Mprotease, and RDRP. The detailed analysis suggested that remdesivir has more than one target of SARS-CoV-2.