Optimized hydrothermal carbonization of chicken manure and anaerobic digestion of its process water for better energy management.

Modern poultry production is faced with the challenge of properly managing its associated wastes, in particular chicken manure (CM). There is a need to improve the management of CM through conversion processes that allow the production of value-added products, particularly for energy purposes, such as hydrothermal carbonization (HTC) and anaerobic digestion (AD). The objectives of this study were: i) to optimize the CM-HTC, using response surface methodology with simultaneous optimization of mass yield and higher heating value (HHV), and ii) to evaluate the biomethane potential of the process water generated from hydrochar production under the optimized condition.

Effects of dietary co-exposure to fungal and herbal functional feed additives on immune parameters and microbial intestinal diversity in rainbow trout (Oncorhynchus mykiss).

Misuse and overuse of antibiotics in aquaculture has proven to be an unsustainable practice leading to increased bacterial resistance. An alternative strategy involves the inclusion of immunostimulants in fish diets, especially fungal and herbal compounds already authorized for human consumption, hence without environmental or public health concerns. In this study, we used a holistic and cross-disciplinary pipeline to assess the immunostimulatory properties of two fungi: Trametes versicolor and Ganoderma lucidum; one herbal supplement, capsaicin in the form of Espelette pepper (Capsicum annuum), and a combination of these fungal and herbal additives on rainbow trout (Oncorhynchus mykiss).

A comparative study of pre-trained language models for named entity recognition in clinical trial eligibility criteria from multiple corpora.

Background: Clinical trial protocols are the foundation for advancing medical sciences, however, the extraction of accurate and meaningful information from the original clinical trials is very challenging due to the complex and unstructured texts of such documents. Named entity recognition (NER) is a fundamental and necessary step to process and standardize the unstructured text in clinical trials using Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques.

Methods: In this study we fine-tuned pre-trained language models to support the NER task on clinical trial eligibility criteria.

Ecosystem-specific microbiota and microbiome databases in the era of big data.

The rapid development of sequencing methods over the past decades has accelerated both the potential scope and depth of microbiota and microbiome studies. Recent developments in the field have been marked by an expansion away from purely categorical studies towards a greater investigation of community functionality. As in-depth genomic and environmental coverage is often distributed unequally across major taxa and ecosystems, it can be difficult to identify or substantiate relationships within microbial communities.

Plants Dictate Root Microbial Composition in Hydroponics and Aquaponics.

The role of the microbial community in mediating fish and plant co-culture is often considered the black box of aquaponics. Despite widespread recognition regarding the dependency of plants on their rhizosphere, the extent to which upstream aquaculture influences downstream hydroponic root communities has been poorly described in the literature. In this study we performed a taxonomic survey (16S rRNA metabarcoding) of microbial communities originating in the facility water source, hydroponic nutrient solution (HNS) sump, nutrient supplemented biofilter effluent (BF) sump, and recirculating aquaculture system tanks stocked with Nile tilapia ().

Xcellerate Investigator Portal: A New Web-Based Tool for Online Delivery of Central Laboratory Data, Reports, and Communications to Clinical Sites.

Covance Drug Development produces more than 55 million test results via its central laboratory services, requiring the delivery of more than 10 million reports annually to investigators at 35,000 sites in 89 countries. Historically, most of these data were delivered via fax or electronic data transfers in delimited text or SAS transport file format. Here, we present a new web portal that allows secure online delivery of laboratory results, reports, manuals, and training materials, and enables collaboration with investigational sites through alerts, announcements, and communications.

A new risk and issue management system to improve productivity, quality, and compliance in clinical trials.

Objective: We present a new system to track, manage, and report on all risks and issues encountered during a clinical trial.

Materials And Methods: Our solution utilizes JIRA, a popular issue and project tracking tool for software development, augmented by third-party and custom-built plugins to provide the additional functionality missing from the core product.

Results: The new system integrates all issue types under a single tracking tool and offers a range of capabilities, including configurable issue management workflows, seamless integration with other clinical systems, extensive history, reporting, and trending, and an intuitive web interface.

Adsorption of nitrogen-containing compounds on hydroxylated α-quartz surfaces.

Adsorption energies of various nitrogen-containing compounds (specifically, 2,4,6-trinitrotoluene (TNT), 2,4-dinitrotoluene (DNT), 2,4-dinitroanisole (DNAn), and 3-nitro-1,2,4-triazole-5-one (NTO)) on the hydroxylated (001) and (100) α-quartz surfaces are computed. Different density functionals are utilized and both periodic as well as cluster approaches are applied. From the adsorption energies, partition coefficients on the considered α-quartz surfaces are derived.

A dimensional warehouse for integrating operational data from clinical trials.

Timely, consistent and integrated access to clinical trial data remains one of the pharmaceutical industry's most pressing needs. As part of a comprehensive clinical data repository, we have developed a data warehouse that can integrate operational data from any source, conform it to a canonical data model and make it accessible to study teams in a timely, secure and contextualized manner to support operational oversight, proactive risk management and other analytic and reporting needs. Our solution consists of a dimensional relational data warehouse, a set of extraction, transformation and loading processes to coordinate data ingestion and mapping, a generalizable metrics engine to enable the computation of operational metrics and key performance, quality and risk indicators and a set of graphical user interfaces to facilitate configuration, management and administration.

A late-binding, distributed, NoSQL warehouse for integrating patient data from clinical trials.

Clinical trial data are typically collected through multiple systems developed by different vendors using different technologies and data standards. That data need to be integrated, standardized and transformed for a variety of monitoring and reporting purposes. The need to process large volumes of often inconsistent data in the presence of ever-changing requirements poses a significant technical challenge.

A cross-source, system-agnostic solution for clinical data review.

Assembly of complete and error-free clinical trial data sets for statistical analysis and regulatory submission requires extensive effort and communication among investigational sites, central laboratories, pharmaceutical sponsors, contract research organizations and other entities. Traditionally, this data is captured, cleaned and reconciled through multiple disjointed systems and processes, which is resource intensive and error prone. Here, we introduce a new system for clinical data review that helps data managers identify missing, erroneous and inconsistent data and manage queries in a unified, system-agnostic and efficient way.

Risk-based Monitoring of Clinical Trials: An Integrative Approach.

Purpose: Clinical trial monitoring is an essential component of drug development aimed at safeguarding subject safety, data quality, and protocol compliance by focusing sponsor oversight on the most important aspects of study conduct. In recent years, regulatory agencies, industry consortia, and nonprofit collaborations between industry and regulators, such as TransCelerate and International Committee for Harmonization, have been advocating a new, risk-based approach to monitoring clinical trials that places increased emphasis on critical data and processes and encourages greater use of centralized monitoring. However, how best to implement risk-based monitoring (RBM) remains unclear and subject to wide variations in tools and methodologies.

Benefits of micronized purified flavonoid fraction as adjuvant therapy on inflammatory response after sclerotherapy.

Background: Sclerotherapy is the treatment of choice for telangiectasias. The aim of this study was to investigate the systemic and local inflammatory response after sclerotherapy in women with chronic venous disease (CVD) and to assess the effects of micronized purified flavonoid fraction (MPFF) in combination with sclerotherapy on markers of inflammation and endothelial dysfunction.

Methods: Sixty women with primary CVD CEAP class C1 were randomly assigned sclerotherapy in combination with MPFF treatment (N=30) or sclerotherapy alone (control) group (N.

COMPARATIVE PHYSIOCHEMICAL ANALYSIS OF HYDROPHOBINS PRODUCED IN ESCHERICHIA COLI AND PICHIA PASTORIS.

Hydrophobins (HFBs) are small surface-active proteins secreted by filamentous fungi. Being amphiphilic, they spontaneously form layers that convert surfaces from hydrophilic to hydrophobic and vice versa. We have compared properties of the class II HFB4 and HFB7 from Trichoderma virens as produced in Escherichia coli and Pichia pastoris.

Mobilization of Cd from human serum albumin by small molecular weight thiols.

Although the toxic metal Cd is an established human nephrotoxin, little is known about the role that interactions with plasma constitutents play in determining its mammalian target organs. To gain insight, a Cd-human serum albumin (HSA) complex was analyzed on a system consisting of size exclusion chromatography (SEC) coupled on-line to a flame atomic absorption spectrometer (FAAS). Using phosphate buffered saline (pH 7.

A theoretical study on ascorbic acid dissociation in water clusters.

Dissociation of ascorbic acid in water has been studied by using a cluster model. It was examined by density functional theory (DFT) with the В3LYP, M06, and wB97XD functionals and a 6-311++G(d,p) basis set. The thermodynamic and kinetic characteristics of proton transfer from ascorbic acid molecule to water clusters were calculated as well as the equilibrium constants (pK a ) for the related processes.

From ClinicalTrials.gov trial registry to an analysis-ready database of clinical trial results.

Background: The ClinicalTrials.gov web site provides a convenient interface to look up study results, but it does not allow downloading data in a format that can be readily used for quantitative analyses.

Purpose: To develop a system that automatically downloads study results from ClinicalTrials.

Use of ClinicalTrials.gov to estimate condition-specific nocebo effects and other factors affecting outcomes of analgesic trials.

Unlabelled: ClinicalTrials.gov is a registry and results database of federally and privately supported clinical trials conducted worldwide. We sought to answer: what are the characteristics of pain trials; how frequently are these trials stopped and why; what is the magnitude of attrition due to lack of efficacy or adverse events; and whether the withdrawal rates depend on pain syndrome.

Sparse learning and stability selection for predicting MCI to AD conversion using baseline ADNI data.

Background: Patients with Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) are at high risk of progression to Alzheimer's dementia. Identifying MCI individuals with high likelihood of conversion to dementia and the associated biosignatures has recently received increasing attention in AD research. Different biosignatures for AD (neuroimaging, demographic, genetic and cognitive measures) may contain complementary information for diagnosis and prognosis of AD.

A novel subject synchronization clinical trial design for Alzheimer's disease.

One of the challenges in developing a viable therapy for Alzheimer's disease has been demonstrating efficacy within a clinical trial. Using this as motivation, we sought to re-examine conventional clinical trial practices in order to determine whether efficacy can be better shown through alternative trial designs and novel analysis methods. In this work, we hypothesize that the confounding factors which hamper the ability to discern a treatment signal are the variability in observations as well as the insidious nature of the disease.

An integrated data management framework for drug discovery--from data capturing to decision support.

Drug discovery is a highly complex process requiring scientists from wide-ranging disciplines to work together in a well-coordinated and streamlined fashion. While the process can be compartmentalized into well-defined functional domains, the success of the entire enterprise rests on the ability to exchange data conveniently between these domains, and integrate it in meaningful ways to support the design, execution and interpretation of experiments aimed at optimizing the efficacy and safety of new drugs. This, in turn, requires information management systems that can support many different types of scientific technologies generating data of imposing complexity, diversity and volume.

Disease progression model in subjects with mild cognitive impairment from the Alzheimer's disease neuroimaging initiative: CSF biomarkers predict population subtypes.

Aim: The objective is to develop a semi-mechanistic disease progression model for mild cognitive impairment (MCI) subjects. The model aims to describe the longitudinal progression of ADAS-cog scores from the Alzheimer's disease neuroimaging initiative trial that had data from 198 MCI subjects with cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) information who were followed for 3 years.

Method: Various covariates were tested on disease progression parameters and these variables fell into six categories: imaging volumetrics, biochemical, genetic, demographic, cognitive tests and CSF biomarkers.

Efficient substructure searching of large chemical libraries: the ABCD chemical cartridge.

Efficient substructure searching is a key requirement for any chemical information management system. In this paper, we describe the substructure search capabilities of ABCD, an integrated drug discovery informatics platform developed at Johnson & Johnson Pharmaceutical Research & Development, L.L.