During the chemotherapy of cancer, drug resistance is the first issue that chemotherapeutic drugs cannot be effectively used for the treatment of cancers repeatedly for a long term, and the main reason for this is that tumor cell detoxification is mediated by GSH (glutathione) catalyzed by GST (glutathione-S-transferase). In this study, a GST inhibitor, ethacrynic acid (ECA), was designed to be...

While the interest of Embodied Conversational Agents (ECA) in health care context increased, the extent to which patients find ECAs acceptable should be more evaluated. Thus, in this study, we evaluated the acceptability of an ECA who conducts a clinical structured interview to make a medical diagnosis, in comparison with the same clinical structured interview presented in written form on a tab...

Amajor problem with dialectal Arabic acoustic modeling is due to the very sparse available speech resources. In this paper, we have chosen Egyptian Colloquial Arabic (ECA) as a typical dialect. In order to benefit from existing Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) resources, a cross-lingual acoustic modeling approach is proposed that is based on supervised model adaptation. MSA acoustic models were ada...

A new sensitive and precise method for quantitative determination of direct thrombin inhibitors is described, the ecarin chromogenic assay (ECA). Ecarin is used as the specific prothrombin-activating principle. The cleavage of a chromogenic substrate by meizothrombin is inhibited in a concentration-dependent fashion by direct thrombin inhibitors. For the ECA, the linear measuring range is about...

BACKGROUND A critical and as-yet unmet need in Alzheimer disease (AD) research is the development of novel markers that can identify individuals at risk for cognitive decline due to AD. This would aid intervention trials designed to slow the progression of AD by increasing diagnostic certainty, and provide new pathophysiologic clues and potential drug targets. RESULTS We used two metabolomics...

OBJECTIVE To ascertain whether clinically diagnosed rheumatoid arthritis (RA) patients having antibodies to enterobacterial common antigens (ECA) in synovial fluid (SF) have a histological appearance characteristic of RA synovitis. METHODS Twenty-five RA patients for which synovial biopsy specimens were preserved, were selected from 58 patients with RA tested for antibodies to ECA in SF The s...

BACKGROUND High-grade stenosis of the internal carotid artery (ICA) may result in flow diversion to the external carotid artery (ECA) and its branches. Head and facial pain secondary to flow-diversion to ECA and increase in regional blood flow are under-recognized and unreported. DESIGN/METHODS We report a patient with high-grade ICA stenosis and recurrent ipsilateral headaches that resolved ...

We investigated a role of neuroregulation in the release of eosinophil chemotactic activity (ECA) from bovine bronchial epithelial cells (BBEC). BBEC were stimulated with acetylcholine (ACh) and substance P (SP), and the supernatant fluids were tested for ECA by a blind-well chemotactic chamber technique. BBEC released ECA in response to ACh and SP in a dose- and time-dependent manner. Checkerb...

Phosphoglyceride-linked enterobacterial common antigen (ECA(PG)) is a cell surface glycolipid that is synthesized by all gram-negative enteric bacteria. The carbohydrate portion of ECA(PG) consists of linear heteropolysaccharide chains comprised of the trisaccharide repeat unit Fuc4NAc-ManNAcA-GlcNAc, where Fuc4NAc is 4-acetamido-4,6-dideoxy-D-galactose, ManNAcA is N-acetyl-D-mannosaminuronic a...

Cell cultures derived from trabecular meshworks of human and bovine eyes and from bovine vascular endothelia were incubated at 37 degrees C for 1 hr with ethacrynic acid (ECA, 0.1-0.5 mmol/l) dissolved in culture medium. At 2 hr after the initial exposure, ECA at concentrations up to 0.4 mmol/l induced a reversible alteration in cell shape in all three cell types that was coincident with a chan...