Summary
Background
Clostridium difficile infection (CDI) may not respond to initial therapy and frequently recurs, but predictors of response and recurrence are inconsistent. The impact of specific ...alterations in the gut microbiota determining treatment response and recurrence in patients with CDI is unknown.
Aim
To assess microbial signatures as predictors of treatment response and recurrence in CDI.
Methods
Pre‐treatment stool samples and clinical metadata including outcomes were collected prospectively from patients with their first CDI episode. Next generation 16s rRNA sequencing using MiSeq Illumina platform was performed and changes in microbial community structure were correlated with CDI outcomes.
Results
Eighty‐eight patients (median age 52.7 years, 60.2% female) were included. Treatment failure occurred in 12.5% and recurrence after response in 28.5%. Patients who responded to treatment had an increase in Ruminococcaceae, Rikenellaceae, Clostridiaceae, Bacteroides, Faecalibacterium and Rothia compared to nonresponders. A risk‐index built from this panel of microbes differentiated responders (mean 0.07 ± 0.24) from nonresponders (0.52 ± 0.42; P = 0.0002). Receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve demonstrated that risk‐index was a strong predictor of treatment response with an area under the curve (AUC) of 0.85. Among clinical parameters tested, only proton pump inhibitor use predicted recurrent CDI (OR 3.75, 95% CI 1.27–11.1, P = 0.01). Patients with recurrent CDI had statistically significant increases in Veillonella, Enterobacteriaceae, Streptococci, Parabacteroides and Lachnospiraceae compared to patients without recurrence and a risk index was able to predict recurrence (AUC = 0.78).
Conclusion
Gut microbiota signatures predict treatment response and recurrence potentially, allowing identification of patients with Clostridium difficile infection that may benefit from early institution of alternate therapies.
Chemotherapy For Advanced Oral Cancer Khanna, N. N.; Khanna, A.; Pant, G. C. ...
Indian Journal of Plastic Surgery/Indian journal of plastic surgery,
02/2024, Letnik:
14, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Summary A combination of three drugs, cyclophosphamide, methotrexate and 5-Fluorouracil was tried in 50 consecutive cases of advanced oral cancer. The overall response rate was 66%, and the incidence ...of toxicity 18%. The response was better in primary cases as compared to those who had received prior radiotherapy. However the response was shortlived.
In recent years corrosion-resistant self-healing coatings have witnessed strong growth and their successful laboratory design and synthesis categorises them in the family of smart/multi-functional ...materials. Among various approaches for achieving self-healing, microcapsule embedment through the material matrix is the main one for self-healing ability in coatings. The present work focuses on optimizing the process parameters for developing microcapsules by
polymerization of linseed oil as core and urea-formaldehyde as shell material. Characteristics of these microcapsules with respect to change in processing parameters such as stirring rate and reaction time were studied by using optical microscopy (OM), scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FT-IR). The effectiveness of these microcapsules in coatings was characterized by studying their adhesion, performance, and mechanical properties.
This report provides a perspective on metabolic glycoengineering methodology developed over the past two decades that allows natural sialic acids to be replaced with chemical variants in living cells ...and animals. Examples are given demonstrating how this technology provides the glycoscientist with chemical tools that are beginning to reproduce Mother Nature's control over complex biological systems - such as the human brain - through subtle modifications in sialic acid chemistry. Several metabolic substrates (e.g., ManNAc, Neu5Ac, and CMP-Neu5Ac analogs) can be used to feed flux into the sialic acid biosynthetic pathway resulting in numerous - and sometime quite unexpected - biological repercussions upon nonnatural sialoside display in cellular glycans. Once on the cell surface, ketone-, azide-, thiol-, or alkyne-modified glycans can be transformed with numerous ligands via bioorthogonal chemoselective ligation reactions, greatly increasing the versatility and potential application of this technology. Recently, sialic acid glycoengineering methodology has been extended to other pathways with analog incorporation now possible in surface-displayed GalNAc and fucose residues as well as nucleocytoplasmic O-GlcNAc-modified proteins. Finally, recent efforts to increase the "druggability" of sugar analogs used in metabolic glycoengineering, which have resulted in unanticipated "scaffold-dependent" activities, are summarized.
First-principles theoretical studies on the electronic properties and activation energies for the three steps of the Suzuki cross-coupling reaction have been performed on 3d transition-metal clusters ...and Pd/Ni bimetallic clusters supported on defected graphene. The ability of the clusters to effectively donate and accept charge is found to be critical to the activity of the catalysts, and graphene further enhances this ability. Nickel acts as the best replacement for palladium in cross-coupling catalysts for the oxidation steps but is not a good replacement in the transmetallation and reductive elimination steps which require the cluster to serve as a charge acceptor. Reducing the size of the cluster from Ni13 to Ni4 enhances the activity because of the cluster being more positively charged. Bimetallic Pd/Ni clusters were found to offer even lower activation energies for all three steps of the Suzuki reaction because of charge donation from the Ni atoms to the Pd atoms making the bimetallic cluster a highly active co-catalyst. This study reveals that the donor–acceptor concepts that explain the enhanced activity of Pd clusters on defected graphene can also be applied to explain lowered activation energies in bimetallic clusters acting as co-catalysts.
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