BACKGROUND Improved understanding of the interactions between bone cells and endothelial cells involved in osteogenesis should aid the development of new strategies for bone tissue engineering. The aim of the present study was to determine whether direct communication between bone marrow stromal cells (MSC) and human umbilical vein endothelial cells (EC) could influence the osteogenic potential...

Tissue engineering may offer patients new options when replacement or repair of an organ is needed. However, most tissues will require a microvascular network to supply oxygen and nutrients. One strategy for creating a microvascular network would be promotion of vasculogenesis in situ by seeding vascular progenitor cells within the biopolymeric construct. To pursue this strategy, we isolated CD...

We investigated favourable perceptions of electronic cigarettes (ECs) relative to cigarettes and their associations with EC use susceptibility in adolescents. Hong Kong Chinese Secondary 1-6 (U.S. grade 7-12) students (n = 40,202) were surveyed in 2014/2015 on EC use, cigarette smoking, favourable perceptions of ECs relative to cigarettes, EC use susceptibility, family smoking, and socio-demogr...

Although the highly proliferative, migratory and multidrug resistant phenotype of human type II endometrial carcinoma (EC) is well characterized, improved clinical treatments have not yet been developed. In this study, CD44 and CD133 were used as markers to screen, isolate and enrich carcinoma-initiating cells (CICs) from the human type II EC cell...

OBJECTIVE To study the association between knowledge about levonorgestrel emergency contraception (LNG-EC) and the risk of ectopic pregnancy (EP) following LNG-EC failure. METHODS This study included 600 women who had visited the hospital with LNG-EC failure. Of these, 300 with EP and 300 with intrauterine pregnancy (IUP) were recruited to the EP group and IUP group respectively. The particip...

We investigate the impossibility of solving certain problems in an unreliable distributed system where multiple processes may fail. A necessary condition is provided for the solvability of problems in the presence of multiple faulty processes, and variants of problems which are unsolvable in the presence of a single faulty pro~~s (such as consensu.s, ehoo~ing a leader, r~g, matching) are shown ...

Electronic structure theory under the influence of apolar solvents suffers from substantial methodical difficulties since in this case the solvent-induced solute polarization originates mainly from specific directional interactions and higher electric multipoles. Continuum solvation models based on the dielectric solvent response such as the PCM approach ignore such interactions and can therefo...