Defining the Critical Valency of Peptide-MHC on Nanoscale Artificial Antigen Presenting Cells for Expanding Endogenous Tumor-Specific T-cells .

Expanding tumor antigen-specific T-cells remains a major challenge in developing effective cancer immunotherapeutics. Artificial antigen-presenting cells (aAPCs) have the potential to overcome this challenge, but formulating aAPCs without correlating the dynamics of T-cell expansion often leads to suboptimal T-cell responses. Here, we have defined the critical effect of the peptide-major histocompatibility complex (p-MHC) valency displayed along with co-stimulatory molecules on iron-oxide nanoparticle-based aAPCs and demonstrated that the functionality of these aAPCs is governed by the p-MHC valency.

Inhibition of Melanoma Growth by Ex Vivo Expanded Tumor-Specific CD8+ T Cells Is Dependent on the Configuration of Nanoscale Artificial APCs.

Adoptive T-cell therapy is an emerging immunotherapeutic strategy for treating cancer, but the compromised quality of CD8+ T-cells limits the therapeutic efficacy. Traditional methods involving polyclonal expansion of CD8+ T-cells mainly prioritize yielding a high quantity of CD8+ T-cells. However, the antigen-specificity of ex vivo expanded CD8+ T-cells and the ability to produce cytolytic molecules are the two critical determinants of therapeutic efficacy that remain poorly studied.

Isolation and characterization of lumpy skin disease virus from cattle in India.

Lumpy skin disease (LSD) has devastating economic impact. During the last decade, LSD had spread to climatically new and previously disease-free countries, which also includes its recent emergence in the Indian subcontinent (2019). This study deals with the LSD outbreak(s) from cattle in Ranchi (India).

Improvement in fluoride remediation technology using GIS based mapping of fluoride contaminated groundwater and microbe assisted phytoremediation.

Fluoride (F) in groundwater is a major issue of water pollution. Geo-statistical analysis of groundwater quality in Newai Tehsil, (India) has been done in order to identify the possible spatial distribution of water quality parameters and to assess the spatial dependence of water properties with the help of principal component analysis (PCA) structure. Two types of maps (spatial map and principal component map) of groundwater quality have been developed.

Isolation, identification and characterization of a Peste des Petits Ruminants virus from an outbreak in Nanakpur, India.

A Peste des Petits Ruminants virus (PPRV) was isolated from an outbreak that occurred in sheep and goats in Nanakpur village of Mathura District in Uttar Pradesh (India). Based on hemagglutination of chicken red blood cells (rbcs), cytopathic effect similar to that caused by the Morbilliviruses in Vero cells, and amplification and sequence analysis of the viral nucleoprotein (N) gene, the identity of the virus was confirmed as PPRV and named PPRV/C. hircus-tc/India/2012/Nanakpur1 (in short PPRV/Nkp1/2012).