Buus Hoyle (bowstove5)
Osteopathic manipulative treatment (OMT) is frequently offered to people with nonspecific low back pain (LBP) but never compared with sham OMT for reducing LBP-specific activity limitations. To compare the efficacy of standard OMT vs sham OMT for reducing LBP-specific activity limitations at 3 months in persons with nonspecific subacute or chronic LBP. This prospective, parallel-group, single-blind, single-center, sham-controlled randomized clinical trial recruited participants with nonspecific subacute or chronic LBP from a tertiary care center in France starting February 17, 2014, with follow-up completed on October 23, 2017. Participants were randomly allocated to interventions in a 11 ratio. Data were analyzed from March 22, 2018, to December 5, 2018. Six sessions (1 every 2 weeks) of standard OMT or sham OMT delivered by nonphysician, nonphysiotherapist osteopathic practitioners. The primary end point was mean reduction in LBP-specific activity limitations at 3 months as measured by the self-adeffect on LBP-specific activity limitations vs sham OMT. However, the clinical relevance of this effect is questionable. ClinicalTrials.gov Identifier NCT02034864. ClinicalTrials.gov Identifier NCT02034864.The human sodium iodide symporter (hNIS) can be linked to the downstream of radiation-sensitive early growth response protein1 (Egr1) promoter, and activated by the Egr1 following 131I treatment. However, the rapid outflow of 131I restricted the radiotherapy effect. To overcome this barrier, ultrasmall gold nanoclusters (usAuNCs) were used to enhance the radiotherapy efficacy of Egr1-hNIS for its radiation sensitization. In this work, we prepared "cell bomb" BMSCs carrying both GSH@AuNCs and Egr1-hNIS. We found that the "cell bomb" can target TNBC tumor and reach a maximum 131I concentration 9 h following 131I injection. Colony formation assay revealed that 131I, 131I combined with GSH@AuNCs could independently inhibit 39.5% and 66.4% of cell growth, respectively. Moreover, in vivo131I therapy further demonstrated that the growth of triple negative breast cancer (TNBC) was controlled by BMSC-Egr1-hNIS + AuNCs group, with relative volume inhibition percentages of 56.16% (compared with the control group) and 36.20% (compared with the BMSC-Egr1-hNIS group), respectively. To summarize, we successfully prepared BMSC-Egr1-hNIS carrying GSH@AuNCs to target TNBC which could synergistically improve the efficacy of hNIS gene therapy.Methods to separate circulating tumor cells (CTCs) from blood samples were intensively researched in order to understand the metastatic process and develop corresponding clinical assays. However current methods faced challenges that stemmed from CTCs' heterogeneity in their biological markers and physical morphologies. To this end, we developed integrated ferrohydrodynamic cell separation (iFCS), a scheme that separated CTCs independent of their surface antigen expression and physical characteristics. iFCS integrated both diamagnetophoresis of CTCs and magnetophoresis of blood cells together via a magnetic liquid medium, ferrofluid, whose magnetization could be tuned by adjusting its magnetic volume concentration. In this paper, we presented the fundamental theory of iFCS and its specific application in CTC separation. Governing equations of iFCS were developed to guide its optimization process. Three critical parameters that affected iFCS's cell separation performance were determined and validated theoretically and experimentally. These parameters included the sample flow rate, the volumetric concentration of magnetic materials in the ferrofluid, and the gradient of the magnetic flux density. We determined these optimized parameters in an iFCS device that led to a high recovery CTC separation in both spiked and clinical samples.The design of multifunctional sensors based on biocompatible hybrid materials consisting of conjugated polythiophene-qu