Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
No Advantage of Cell-Penetrating Peptides over Receptor-Specific Antibodies in Targeting Antigen to Human Dendritic Cells for Cross-Presentation1

Induction of CTL responses by dendritic cell (DC)-based vaccines requires efficient DC-loading strategies for class I Ags. Coupling Ags to cell-penetrating peptides (CPPs) or receptor-specific Abs improves Ag loading of DCs. In contrast to CPPs, receptor-specific Abs deliver conjugated Ags to DCs with high specificity, which is advantageous for in vivo strategies. It has, however, been speculated that CPPs facilitate uptake and endosomal escape of conjugated Ags, which would potently enhance cross-presentation. In this study, we directly compare the in vitro targeting efficiency of a humanized D1 Ab directed against the human DC surface receptor DC-SIGN hD1 to that of three CPPs. The three CPPs colocalized within endosomes when targeted to human monocyte-derived DCs simultaneously, whereas hD1 was present in a different set of endosomes. However, within 75 min after uptake CPPs and hD1 colocalized extensively within the lysosomal compartment. Ab-mediated targeting of class I-restricted peptides to DC-SIGN enhanced cross-presentation of the peptides, while only one of the CPPs enhanced peptide presentation. This CPP and hD1 enhanced cross-presentation with equal efficiencies. Thus, we found no evidence of CPP specifically favoring the delivery of conjugated Ag to the DC class I presentation pathway. Given the specificity with which Abs recognize their targets, this favors the use of DC receptor-specific Abs for in vivo vaccination strategies.
Perifollicular fibromas associated with Birt–Hogg–Dubé syndrome

1 Tsutsumida A, Yamamoto Y, Minakawa H, Yoshida T, Kokubu I, Sugihara T. Indications for lymph node dissection in the treatment of extramammary Paget’s disease. Dermatol Surg 2003; 29: 21–24. 2 Kabata D, Endo Y, Fujisawa A et al. Bilateral inguinal positive sentinel lymph node metastases of extramammary paget disease: does this clinical situation have a surgical indication? Dermatol Surg 2012; 38: 1392–1394. 3 Matsushita S, Yonekura K, Mera K, Kawai K, Kanekura T. Successful treatment of metastatic extramammary Paget’s disease with S-1 and docetaxel combination chemotherapy. J Dermatol 2011; 38: 996–998. 4 Mikoshiba Y, Uhara H, Kubo H, Okuyama R. S-1 induced a durable response in metastatic extramammary Paget’s disease. J Dermatol 2013; 40: 664–665. 5 Nakamori R, Omoto Y, Yamanaka K, Habe K, Kurokawa I, Mizutani H. Complete remission of advanced extramammary Paget’s disease treated with docetaxel: a case report. Clin Exp Dermatol 2010; 37: 194–195.
Investigation of eating disorders in cancer patients and its relevance with body image

Background: Eating disorder is one of the most common health problems with clinical and psychological consequences, which can affect body image in cancer patients. Similar studies in this area for checking the status of this disorder and its relevance with body image in patients with cancer are limited. Therefore, this study was designed with the aim of determination of eating disorders in patients with cancer and their relevance with body image. Materials and Methods: The research was a cross-correlation study. It was carried out in Sayed-Al-Shohada Hospital affiliated to the Isfahan University of Medical Sciences in 2013. Two hundred and ten patients with cancer were selected and were asked tocomplete the demographic and disease characteristics questionnaire, the Multidimensional Body-Self Relations Questionnaire (MBSRQ), and eating disorders questionnaire. SPSS statistical software, version 14 was used for statistical analysis’-Test, analysis of variance (ANOVA), and Pearson correlation coefficient were used for analyzing the obtained data. Results: The mean values of age, body mass index (BMI), and duration of illness were 48.2 ± 13.20 years, 24.6 ± 4.6kg/m2, and 25.64 ± 21.24months, respectively. Most patients were married (87%), without university education (96%), unemployed (67%), and with incomes below their requirement (52%). Most patients were diagnosed with breast cancer (36.5%). They received chemotherapy as the main treatment (56.2%). In addition, mean ± SD of eating disorders and body image were 12.84 ± 4.7 and184.40 ± 43.68, respectively. Also, 49.7% of patients with cancer had an eating disorder. Among these, 29% had experiences of anorexia and 20.7% had bulimia. There was a significant negative correlation between the score of body image and eating disorders (r = −0.47, P = 0.01). Conclusions: Findings of this study showed that most patients with cancer had experienced symptoms of eating disorders. This may lead to a negative impact on the body image in these patients and may be the cause of further psychological and physical changes in these patients. The findings of this study can assist the healthcare team to pay more attention to eating disorders and body image in patients with cancer and also in considering the relationship of these issues in their evaluations.
The moral reasoning of males and females in response to hypothetical dilemmas involving the care of elderly family members

Twenty Midwestern Caucasian college students, ten males and ten females, were tested on justice and care orientations when reasoning about hypothetical moral dilemmas involving the care of elderly family members. A slightly modified version of the dilemma developed in Stack's (1990) study was used along with a new dilemma developed by the author of this study to further clarify the coding process. Lyons' (1983) scoring method and Gilligan's (1982) guidelines were used to code subjects' responses. No sex differences in the type of moral reasoning were found. The results of this study did not support Gilligan's theory that there are two distinct ways of thinking about moral problems, justice reasoning and care reasoning, that are related to gender. They did, however, support Stack's results that the predominate reasoning used in both males and females is a mixture of care and justice reasoning. It was concluded, based on Stack's research and the results of this study, that no sex differences in moral reasoning are present when using the hypothetical dilemmas developed by Stack's subjects and this author.
Transforming neurorehabilitation of walking following stroke : The promise of non-invasive brain stimulation – a review

Purpose: This narrative review discusses the neurophysiology of human motor cortex as it influences gait, and recent advances in the application of non-invasive brain stimulation to the lower limb motor cortex of stroke survivors. Although walking is a high priority following stroke, the efficacy of promising new therapies has yet to warrant their widespread clinical use. For the upper limb, numerous brain stimulation protocols have been described. These protocols, adapted for the leg, are now being used to examine the cortical control of gait. This research discounts the long-held notion that “we walk from our
Comparison of intubating conditions after rocuronium and suxamethonium following “rapid‐sequence induction” with thiopentone in elective cases

Background: Rocuronium (Org 9426) was shown to have the fastest onset of action of all currently available non‐depolarizing neuromuscular blocking drugs and to provide intubating conditions similar to those of suxamethonium 60 to 90 s after administration. We compared the intubating conditions after rocuronium and suxamethonium following rapid‐sequence induction of anaesthesia.
Triple Helix Model’s (THM) impact on enhancing creativity and skills within UAE public and private sectors

Organizations and businesses cannot depend completely on their own to generate new ideas for innovation and development in present knowledge based societies. Consequently, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) announced 2015 as the Year of Innovation and excellence awards have been established aiming to boost cooperation between various sectors in the country. Therefore, the concept of the Triple Helix (university–industry–government) was found as a model of innovation. The aim of this research is to establish the impact of a Triple Helix approach on enhancing creativity and skills within UAE public and private sectors. It explores the concept of the Triple Helix Model (THM) in the context of the UAE public and private sectors focusing on its existence, implementation, barriers and drivers. Methods of analysis include both qualitative and quantitative approach in which a conceptual framework was derived from the literature review, a survey was developed and distributed to a sample of employees from different organizations, and follow-up interviews were carried out with key stakeholders (in which their departments are implementing/ involved in the THM). The findings exposed the stakeholders’ perception about the importance of the concept and each actor’s role in the THM, the limited utilization of the concept among the organizations, and the challenges in terms of relational barriers and knowledge sharing. The research findings reveal that TH approach has a positive influence on enhancing creativity and skills within UAE sectors and several recommendations have been proposed such as leadership involvement and support, designing organizational innovation strategy, and the addition of society helix.
Duration of Untreated Psychosis and Treatment Outcome in Schizophrenia Patients Untreated for Many Years

Objective: The duration of untreated psychosis (DUP) influences treatment outcome in schizophrenia but its relevance in untreated patients, ill for a very long duration, is not known. This study examined outcome and factors related to it after one year of treatment of schizophrenia patients who were ill for many years and not previously treated. Method: Among 75 never-treated patients with schizophrenia detected in a community survey in Chennai, India, 49 took treatment and were followed up prospectively for one year. Evaluation at intake and outcome was carried out using standardized methods. Results: A good clinical outcome in 29%, social outcome in 35%, occupational outcome in 51% and global outcome in 31% was observed at the end of one year. Patients with poor global outcome did not significantly differ from those with good outcome on demographic and clinical variables at intake but for the presence of delusions and formal thought disorder. The proportion with good outcome in clinical, work and global measures fell steadily with increasing DUP. This difference was significant for clinical and global outcomes after a DUP of 5 years. Conclusions: The relationship between DUP and response to treatment held good even in chronic stages of schizophrenia with longer DUP associated with poorer outcome.
Inhibition of vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) is sufficient to completely restore barrier malfunction induced by growth factors in microvascular retinal endothelial cells

Background Deregulated expression of vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF), basic fibroblast growth factor (bFGF) or insulin-like growth factor-1 (IGF-1) is associated with the pathogenesis of diabetic retinopathy. The VEGF165-induced increase in permeability of retinal endothelial cells (REC), probably resulting in diabetic macular oedema (DME), could be completely restored by the VEGF-binding Fab fragment ranibizumab in vitro. We investigated whether bFGF and IGF-1 as single factors or in combination with VEGF165 influence permeability and tight junctions in immortalised bovine REC (iBREC) and if these effects could be restored by inhibition of VEGF. Methods As a measure of changes in cellular permeability, transendothelial electrical resistance (TER) was monitored during long-term treatment of iBREC with growth factors in the absence or presence of ranibizumab or KRN951 (an inhibitor of VEGF receptors). Expression of claudin-1, as an indicator of functional tight junctions, was assessed by western blot analysis. Results Whereas VEGF165 decreased TER and expression of claudin-1 in a concentration-dependent manner, long-term treatment of iBREC with 10–100 ng/ml bFGF or/and IGF-1 did not. Changes in claudin-1 expression or TER, induced by 25 ng/ml VEGF165, were slightly enhanced by bFGF and/or IGF-1 and were accompanied by a slightly increased secretion of VEGF. Complete reversion of these effects was achieved by prolonged treatment with ranibizumab and partly by exposure to KRN951. Conclusion Our findings indicate that VEGF165, but not IGF-1 or bFGF, is mainly responsible for changes in cellular permeability observed in REC. This supports VEGF targeting as a therapeutic concept for DME.
Only Dry Electrodes-based Fully Integrated EEG / fNIRS Hybrid Brain-monitoring System

A portable hybrid brain monitoring (HBM) system is proposed to perform simultaneous electroencephalogram (EEG) and functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) measurements. The proposed system comprises two separate boards for EEG and fNIRS acquisition, and these boards are simultaneously controlled by the STM32L4 microcontroller. In order to facilitate miniaturization and reliable performance, ADS1299 and ADS8688A-analog frontend (AFE) integrated circuits (ICs) for 16-channel EEG and 8-channel fNIRS measurements, respectively, are employed. The noise effect generated from digital circuit components, such as the microcontroller, oscillator, and switching LEDs, is reduced through electrical isolation of the EEG and fNIRS acquisition circuits. Gel-less EEG measurement was enabled by using spring-loaded dry electrodes. Several evaluations were carried out by conducting an EEG phantom test and an arterial occlusion experiment. An alpha rhythm detection test and an experiment to measure mental arithmetic operation were conducted to determine whether the system is applicable to human subject studies. The evaluation results show that the proposed system is sufficiently capable of detecting micro-voltage EEG signals and hemodynamic responses. The results of the human subject studies enabled us to verify that the proposed system is able to detect task-related EEG spectral features such as eye-closed event-related synchronization (ERS) and mental-arithmetic event-related desynchronization (ERD) in the alpha and beta rhythm ranges. An analysis of the fNIRS measurements with an arithmetic operation task also revealed a decreasing trend in oxyhemoglobin concentration.
Stakeholders-oriented Quality of Education Assurance System for successful institutional accreditation

Faculty of Automatic Control, Electronics and Computer Science (AEC), Silesian University of Technology, Poland, is widely recognised as one of the leading polish Higher Education Institution (HEI) units. Recently, the institutional accreditation by the main national accreditation board - Polish Accreditation Council [1, 2] - confirmed the highest teaching standards at the faculty. A significant part of assessment was based on the Faculty Quality of Education Assurance System (FQEAS) performance. In the paper the faculty development strategy and structure of FQEAS will be presented. The assessment criteria will be discussed and the role of quality assurance system will be indicated. Future work with respect to teaching quality improvement, as well as FQEAS development, will be described. The properties of the presented FQEAS can be easily adopted in other national higher education systems.
A NEW APPROACH TO IDENTIFYING HFMD

Article history: Received 12 March 2018 Received in revised form 24 April 2018 Accepted 3 May 2018 Available online 10 May 2018 Enhancements in the diagnostic capabilities using host biomarkers are currently much neededwhere sensitivity and specificity issues plague the diagnosis of Hand, Foot and Mouth Disease (HFMD) in pediatrics clinical samples. We investigated miRNome profiles of HFMD saliva samples against healthy children and developed miRNA-based diagnosis models. Our 6-miRNA scoring model predicted HFMD with an overall accuracy of 85.11% in the training set and 92.86% in the blinded test set of Singapore cohort. Blinded evaluation of the model in Taiwan HFMD cases resulted in 77.08% accuracy with the 6-miRNA model and 68.75% with the 4miRNA model. The strongest predictor of HFMD in all of the panels, hsa-miR-221 was found to be consistently and significantly downregulated in all of our HFMD cohorts. This is the first study to prove that HFMD infection could be diagnosed by circulatingmiRNAs in patient's saliva. Moreover, this study also serves as a stepping stone towards the future development of other infectious disease diagnosis workflows using novel biomarkers. © 2018 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).
Reduced circulating natural killer T cells and gamma/delta T cells in patients with systemic sclerosis.

OBJECTIVE To evaluate peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMC) expressing natural killer (NK) cell surface markers (CD16 and CD56, in both CD3- and CD3+ cells) and g/d T cell receptors (TCR) involved in non-MHC-restricted cytotoxicity, assessing their possible relationship with clinical and laboratory variables in patients with systemic sclerosis (SSc). METHODS We submitted 50 patients with SSc to detailed clinical and laboratory assessment, and also performed PBMC subset analyses by direct dual immunofluorescence and flow cytometry. RESULTS No statistically significant differences were found in the percentages or the absolute numbers of total lymphocytes, of B cells, and of CD4+ T cells. The absolute number of CD8+ cells was lower (p < 0.03), while HLA-DR+ elements were higher in frequency (p < 0.03) in SSc patients than in healthy controls. SSc patients had lower values (both percentage and absolute number) of NK-T cells (p < 0.01 and p < 0.003, respectively) and of T cells expressing g/d TCR (p < 0.01 and p < 0.005, respectively); whereas NK cells were marginally but not significantly decreased. The absolute number of NK-T cells showed an inverse correlation to erythrocyte sedimentation rate values (p < 0.03; rs = -0.306), percentage of g-globulins (p < 0.01; rs = -0.353), and serum concentrations of IgG (p < 0.02; rs = -0.334). CONCLUSION Impairment of NK-T cells and of T cells expressing g/d TCR may lead to downregulation of normal immune response, and seems to be important for immunological and inflammatory aspects of SSc.
Species and gender differences in the metabolism and distribution of tertiary amyl methyl ether in male and female rats and mice after inhalation exposure or gavage administration

Tertiary amyl methyl ether (TAME) is a gasoline fuel additive used to reduce emissions. Understanding the metabolism and distribution of TAME is needed to assess potential human health issues. The effect of dose level, duration of exposure and route of administration on the metabolism and distribution of TAME were investigated in male and female F344 rats and CD‐1 mice following inhalation or gavage administration. By 48 h after exposure, >96% of the administered radioactivity was expired in air (16–71%) or eliminated in urine and feces (28–72%). Following inhalation exposure, mice had a two‐ to threefold greater relative uptake of [14C]TAME compared with rats. Metabolites were excreted in urine of rats and mice that are formed by glucuronide conjugation of tertiary amyl alcohol (TAA), oxidation of TAA to 2,3‐dihydroxy‐2‐methylbutane and glucuronide conjugation of 2,3‐dihydroxy‐2‐methylbutane. A saturation in the uptake and metabolism of TAME with increased exposure concentration was indicated by a decreased relative uptake of total [14C]TAME equivalents and an increase in the percentage expired as volatiles. A saturation of P‐450 oxidation of TAA was indicated by a disproportional decrease of 2,3‐dihydroxy‐2‐methylbutane and its glucuronide conjugate with increased exposure concentration. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Creative industries and the productivity of the European regions

Resumen: This research analyses the effect of creative service industries (CSI) on labour productivity in the regions of the European Union. CSI offer services that increase the capacity of generation and combination of ideas for the whole economy of the region, resulting in increased production of innovations through the generation of new products or varieties, which in turn raises productivity. The article proposes an analytical framework that is contrasted for a sample of 250 regions in 24 countries of the European Union in 2008. We find that a doubling of the percentage of jobs in CSI increases average labour productivity by around 8.6%. This evidence suggests that policy based on creative industries can be as important for productivity as scientific or human capital policies, being an alternative for some regions.
Muscle Gains and Emotional Strains: Conflicting Experiences of Change Among Overweight Women Participating in an Exercise Intervention Program

In this study we explored the experiences of women who were classified as overweight while they participated in a physical activity intervention. In line with interpretative phenomenological analysis, eight women were interviewed prior to and following a 12-week dragon boat physical activity intervention. Data were transcribed verbatim and subjected to individual-level content analysis to explore change that informed group-level idiographic analysis. From the idiographic analysis three distinct profiles were created: (a) women who consistently struggled with negative self-perceptions; (b) women who consistently experienced positive self-perceptions; and (c) women who began with negative self-perceptions and developed more positive self-images. These profiles appeared to be associated with age, since the youngest women placed significant emphasis on the body and physical appearance, whereas the oldest participants reported the most significant shift from importance of body to a greater emphasis on health and well-being. The findings, which are reported in the context of self-determination theory, suggest that women in each of these profiles had unique physical and social self-perceptions and distinct social interactions within the dragon boat intervention.