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Current knowledge regarding the long-term humoral response of people infected with human immunodeficiency virus to the third dose of inactivated coronavirus disease (COVID-19) vaccine is incomplete. As a result, concerns remain about the safety and efficacy of the vaccination. To improve our understanding of the safety and immunogenicity of the COVID-19 inactivated vaccine booster in people living with HIV (PLWH), a prospective study was conducted on participants who had not yet received a third dose of the COVID-19 inactivated vaccine, had no history of SARS-CoV-2 infection, and had received a second dose of the vaccine more than six months prior. The primary safety outcomes included the incidence of adverse reactions, changes in CD4+ T-cell count, viral load, blood routine examination, liver and kidney function examination, blood sugar, and blood lipid examination. The pseudovirus-neutralizing antibody responses to the D614G variant, Delta variant, and Omicron variants BA.5 and BF.7 were evaluated before vaccination, 14 days, 28 days, 3 months, and 6 months after vaccination to evaluate the immune response of PLWH to the injection of inactivated vaccine booster and the safety of the vaccine. In conclusion, COVID-19 vaccine booster shots were effective in PLWH, resulting in an increase in the number of CD4+ T-cells, neutralizing antibodies that lasted up to six months, and higher levels of neutralizing antibodies lasting approximately 3 months. However, the vaccine protection against the two variants of BA.5 and BF.7 was significantly lower than that of D614G and Delta. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

MRI is the primary imaging approach for diagnosing prostate cancer. Prostate Imaging Reporting and Data System (PI-RADS) on multiparametric MRI (mpMRI) provides fundamental MRI interpretation guidelines but suffers from inter-reader variability. Deep learning networks show great promise in automatic lesion segmentation and classification, which help to ease the burden on radiologists and reduce inter-reader variability. In this study, we proposed a novel multi-branch network, MiniSegCaps, for prostate cancer segmentation and PI-RADS classification on mpMRI. MiniSeg branch outputted the segmentation in conjunction with PI-RADS prediction, guided by the attention map from the CapsuleNet. CapsuleNet branch exploited the relative spatial information of prostate cancer to anatomical structures, such as the zonal location of the lesion, which also reduced the sample size requirement in training due to its equivariance properties. In addition, a gated recurrent unit (GRU) is adopted to exploit spatial knowledge across slices, improving through-plane consistency. Based on the clinical reports, we established a prostate mpMRI database from 462 patients paired with radiologically estimated annotations. MiniSegCaps was trained and evaluated with fivefold cross-validation. On 93 testing cases, our model achieved a 0.712 dice coefficient on lesion segmentation, 89.18% accuracy, and 92.52% sensitivity on PI-RADS classification (PI-RADS ≥ 4) in patient-level evaluation, significantly outperforming existing methods. In addition, a graphical user interface (GUI) integrated into the clinical workflow can automatically produce diagnosis reports based on the results from MiniSegCaps. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Silver nanoparticles (AgNPs) are novel materials with antibacterial, antifungal, and antiviral activities over a wide range. This study aimed to prepare polyvinylpyrrolidone (PVP) electrospinning composites with uniformly distributed AgNPs. In this study, starch-capped ~2 nm primary AgNPs were first synthesized using Atmospheric pressure Pulsed Discharge Plasma (APDP) at AC 10 kV and 10 kHz. Then, 0.6 wt.% AgNPs were mixed into a 10 wt.% PVP ethanol-based polymer solution and coiled through an Ultrasonic-assisted Electrospinning device (US-ES) with a 50 W and 50 kHz ultrasonic generator. At 12 kV and a distance of 10 cm, this work successfully fabricated AgNPs-PVP electrospun fibers. The electrospun products were characterized using Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM), Transmission Electron Microscopy (TEM), High-Resolution TEM (HR-TEM), Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy (FT-IR), X-ray Diffraction (XRD), Thermogravimetric (TG), and X-ray Photoelectron Spectroscopy (XPS) methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is urgent to seek new potential targets for the prevention or relief of gastrointestinal syndrome in clinical radiation therapy for cancers. Vitamin D, mediated through the vitamin D receptor (VDR), has been identified as a protective nutrient against ionizing radiation (IR)-induced damage. This study investigated whether VDR could inhibit IR-induced intestinal injury and explored underlying mechanism. We first found that vitamin D induced VDR expression and inhibited IR-induced DNA damage and apoptosis in vitro. VDR was highly expressed in intestinal crypts and was critical for crypt stem/progenitor cell proliferation under physiological conditions. Next, VDR-deficient mice exposed to IR significantly increased DNA damage and crypt stem/progenitor cell apoptosis, leading to impaired intestinal regeneration as well as shorter survival time. Furthermore, VDR deficiency activated the Pmaip1-mediated apoptotic pathway of intestinal crypt stem/progenitor cells in IR-treated mice, whereas inhibition of Pmaip1 expression by siRNA transfection protected against IR-induced cell apoptosis. Therefore, VDR protects against IR-induced intestinal injury through inhibition of crypt stem/progenitor cell apoptosis via the Pmaip1-mediated pathway. Our results reveal the importance of VDR level in clinical radiation therapy, and targeting VDR may be a useful strategy for treatment of gastrointestinal syndrome. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Asparagine endopeptidase (AEP), also called legumain, is currently the only known cysteine protease that specifically cleaves peptide bonds in asparaginyl residue in the mammalian genome. Since 2003, AEP has been reported to be widely expressed in a variety of carcinomas and is considered a potential therapeutic target. In the following years, researchers intensively investigated the substrates of AEP and the mechanism of AEP in partial tumors. With the identification of substrate proteins such as P53, integrin αvβ3, MMP-2, and MMP-9, the biochemical mechanism of AEP in carcinomas is also more precise. This review will clarify the probable mechanisms of AEP in the progression of breast carcinoma, glioblastoma, gastric carcinoma, and epithelial ovarian carcinoma. This review will also discuss the feasibility of targeted therapy with AEP inhibitor (AEPI) in these carcinomas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]