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El objetivo de la investigación fue detectar la presencia del ácido desoxirribonucleico (ADN) de Bartonella henselae en muestras de sangre de 100 gatos callejeros de albergues, clínicas veterinarias y casas durante los meses de septiembre a diciembre de 2022 en la ciudad de Guayaquil, Ecuador. Las muestras fueron procesadas en el Instituto Nacional de Investigación en Salud Pública (INSPI). Una vez obtenidas, las muestras se refrigeraron por dos a cuatro horas y luego se trasladaron al laboratorio del ISNPI para su procesamiento. El ADN se purificó y se concentró utilizando el minikit de ADN genómico PureLink y se sometió a congelación para su conservación. La presencia del ADN se detectó en la sangre de los gatos mediante la reacción en cadena de la polimerasa (PCR), lo que reveló que Bartonella henselae estaba circulando en la ciudad de Guayaquil con una prevalencia del 14%.

Skin wound healing leads to the recovery of tissue structure and homeostasis after injury. Numerous factors can hamper wound healing and complete recovery of the harmed tissue, causing the formation of scars or chronic wounds. Therapeutic options to improve wound regeneration are limited, possibly due to failure during pre-clinical validation toward clinical trials. In this article, the authors aim to convey key points and provide recommendations for the development of regenerative agents that improve wound healing using mouse models.First, the authors highlight the differences in the wound healing processes of mice and humans. Later, the authors apply a quasi-systematic research approach based on a search algorithm of 32 terms that focuses on in vivomouse model assays of regenerative factors. The authors analyze the top 20 most cited articles of 2241 hits produced by Scopus. The authors focus the search on a period covering the last 10 years (January 2011 to October 2021). The authors synthesize information from the top 20 articles and present the most common type of mouse model used, mouse characteristics (strain, sex, age, weight), surgical wounding technique employed (size, location, equipment), agents tested, methods of wound monitoring, regeneration assessment and key points to consider for the translational potential of these agents. This knowledge will help the scientific community design better in vivo assays and translate their results to further research and clinical validation.

There is pressing urgency to identify drugs that allow treating COVID-19 patients effectively. Respiratory failure is the leading cause of death in patients with severe COVID-19, and the host inflammatory response at the lungs remains poorly understood. Therefore, we retrieved data from postmortem lungs from COVID-19 patients and performed in-depth in silico analyses of single-nucleus RNA sequencing data, inflammatory protein interactome network, functional enrichment, and shortest pathways to cancer hallmark phenotypes to reveal potential therapeutic targets and drugs in advanced-stage COVID-19 clinical trials. Herein, we analyzed transcriptomics data of 719 inflammatory response genes across 19 cell types (116,313 nuclei) from lung autopsies. The functional enrichment analysis of the 233 significantly expressed genes showed that the most relevant biological annotations were: inflammatory response, innate immune response, cytokine production, interferon production, macrophage activation, thymic stromal lymphopoietin, blood coagulation, IL-1 and megakaryocytes in obesity, NLRP3 inflammasome complex, and the TLR, JAK-STAT, NF-κB, TNF, oncostatin M, AGE-RAGE signaling pathways. Subsequently, we identified 34 essential inflammatory proteins with both high-confidence protein interactions and shortest pathways to inflammation, cell death, glycolysis, and angiogenesis. Lastly, we propose five small molecules involved in advanced-stage COVID-19 clinical trials: baricitinib, pacritinib, and ruxolitinib are tyrosine-protein kinase JAK2 inhibitors, losmapimod is a MAP kinase p38 alpha inhibitor, and eritoran is a TLR4/MD-2 antagonist. After being thoroughly analyzed in COVID-19 clinical trials, these drugs can be considered for treating severe COVID-19 patients.

Wound healing (WH) and cancer seem to share common cellular and molecular processes that could work in a tight balance to maintain tissue homeostasis or, when unregulated, drive tumor progression. The “Cancer Hallmarks” comprise crucial biological properties that mediate the advancement of the disease and affect patient prognosis. These hallmarks have been proposed to overlap with essential features of the WH process. However, common hallmarks and proteins actively participating in both processes have yet to be described. In this work we identify 21 WH proteins strongly linked with solid tumors by integrated TCGA Pan-Cancer and multi-omics analyses. These proteins were associated with eight of the ten described cancer hallmarks, especially avoiding immune destruction. These results show that WH and cancer's common proteins are involved in the microenvironment modification of solid tissues and immune system regulation. This set of proteins, between WH and cancer, could represent key targets for developing therapies.

Breast cancer is one of the most frequent malignancies among women worldwide. Methods for screening and diagnosis allow health care professionals to provide personalized treatments that improve the outcome and survival. Scientists and physicians are working side-by-side to develop evidence-based guidelines and equipment to detect cancer earlier. However, the lack of comprehensive interdisciplinary information and understanding between biomedical, medical, and technology professionals makes innovation of new screening and diagnosis tools difficult. This critical review gathers, for the first time, information concerning normal breast and cancer biology, established and emerging methods for screening and diagnosis, staging and grading, molecular and genetic biomarkers. Our purpose is to address key interdisciplinary information about these methods for physicians and scientists. Only the multidisciplinary interaction and communication between scientists, health care professionals, technical experts and patients will lead to the development of better detection tools and methods for an improved screening and early diagnosis.