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Drake Hayden posted an update 13 days ago
On the 17th of October 2019, a workshop was held at Wageningen Bioveterinary Research in Lelystad, the Netherlands, to discuss the obstacles to vaccination in the veterinary field. Remdesivir Participants from academia, OIE, FAO, EC, EMA, USDA, national regulatory and veterinary health authorities, and the animal health industry discussed how availability and access to animal vaccines can be improved not just in the EU and US but also in Low to Middle Income Countries (LMIC) across the world and agreed that this requires innovations in both the scientific and the regulatory field. The workshop called for engaging all stakeholders to improve regulatory acceptance of novel vaccine technologies and encourage their registration. There is a need for better mutual understanding between academia, industry and regulators, and more openness to discuss framework, requirements, and product authorisations, and to converge the regulatory rules between regions. The next leap forward could be a broader application of novel technologies using RNA- or DNA-based vaccine platforms, where the “backbone” is maintained, while the gene of interest coding for an immunogenic protein can be exchanged in a standardised manner. This approach enables rapid response in outbreak situations and should lower the risk and cost of vaccine development. Copyright © 2020.OBJECTIVE Maintaining a complete musculoskeletal (MSK) radiology fellowship website is important for recruiting residents, particularly given implementation of the new MSK Match. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the comprehensiveness of MSK fellowship program websites during the first MSK Fellowship Match. MATERIALS AND METHODS A list of MSK fellowships was obtained from the Society for Skeletal Radiology website. Each program’s website was searched for the presence of 23 criteria previously identified as important for radiology residents applying to fellowships (Table 1); including information about the application process, program benefits, clinical and research training, and current fellows and faculty. We used t-tests and ANOVA to compare mean number of criteria present on websites between ACGME nonaccredited and accredited programs. RESULTS Of 89 MSK fellowship programs (15 accredited vs 74 nonaccredited), 81 (91%) had a dedicated MSK fellowship website. Only 6 (7%) assessed at least two-thirds of criteria. The most frequently included information included contact information (100%, 89/89), program description (97%, 86/89), application requirements (92%, 82/88), and length of fellowship (91%, 81/89). The least common information included elective offerings (11%, 10/89), moonlighting opportunities (9%, 8/89), social life (9%, 9/89), and a listing of fellow/faculty publications (9%, 8/89). Nonaccredited programs reported significantly more items than accredited programs (12.3 vs 10.2, P = 0.022). CONCLUSIONS MSK fellowship websites are inadequately comprehensive, with less than half of assessed criteria present, on average. Inclusion of key factors known to be important to radiology residents can serve as opportunities for MSK fellowship websites to better recruit residents. A polymer based dynamic combinatorial library (DCL) was generated through condensation between aldehyde functionalized linear poly(glycidol) (APG) and galactose containing acylhydrazide derivatives. Pentameric E. coli heat labile enterotoxin B subunit (LTB) was subsequently applied to the DCL as external stimulus, resulting in amplification of a specific acylhydrazone side chain that was further used for the synthesis of a multivalent LTB inhibitor. In the in vitro biological evaluation, this inhibitor exhibited strong inhibition properties as well as low cytotoxicity. Carbonic anhydrase IX (CAIX) is an emerging drug target for hypoxia associated cancers. To identify potent and selective inhibitors of CAIX, a small library of ferulic acid (FA) derivatives bearing triazole moiety has been designed, synthesized and evaluated against different human CA isoforms (CAII, CAVA & CAIX). Though most of the compounds showed CAIX inhibition in the micromolar range, compound 7i selectively inhibits CAIX in the nanomolar range (IC50 = 24 nM). In silico analysis revealed binding of 7i with the catalytically important amino acid residues of CAIX. Further, cell-based studies indicate that 7i inhibits the activity of CAIX, decreases the epithelial to mesenchymal transitions, induces apoptosis, inhibits cell migration and colonization potential of cancer cells. Taken together, these results emphasized the use of 7i as a prospective pharmacological lead molecule in CAIX targeted anticancer therapeutics. A unified synthetic approach was developed that enabled the synthesis of diverse tropane-related scaffolds. The key intermediates that were exploited were cycloadducts formed by reaction between 3-hydroxy-pyridinium salts and vinyl sulfones or sulfonamides. The diverse tropane-related scaffolds were formed by addition of substituents to, cyclisation reactions of, and fusion of additional ring(s) to the key bicyclic intermediates. A set of 53 screening compounds was designed, synthesised and evaluated in order to determine the biological relevance of the scaffolds accessible using the synthetic approach. Two inhibitors of Hedgehog signalling, and four compounds with weak activity against the parasite P. falciparum, were discovered. Three of the active compounds may be considered to be indotropane or pyrrotropane pseudo natural products in which a tropane is fused with a fragment from another natural product class. It was concluded that the unified synthetic approach had yielded diverse scaffolds suitable for the design of performance-diverse screening libraries. A lead compound with the (1,3,4-thiadiazol-2-yl)-acrylamide scaffold was discovered to have significant cytotoxicity on several tumor cell lines in an in-house cell-based screening. A total of 60 derivative compounds were then synthesized and tested in a CCK-8 cell viability assay. Some of them exhibited improved cytotoxic activities. The most potent compounds had IC50 values of 1-5 μM on two acute leukemia tumor cell lines, i.e. RS4;11 and HL-60. Flow cytometry analysis of several active compounds and detection of caspase activation indicated that they induced caspase-dependent apoptosis. It was also encouraging to observe that these compounds did not have obvious cytotoxicity on normal cells, i.e. IC50 > 50 μM on HEK-293T cells. Although the molecular targets of this class of compound are yet to be revealed, our current results suggest that this class of compound represents a new possibility for developing drug candidates against acute leukemia.