The hedgehog pathway has been implicated in the formation andmaintenance of a variety of malignancies, including ovarian cancer; however, it is unknown whether hedgehog signaling is involved in ovarian cancer chemoresistance. The goal of this study was to determine the effects of antagonizing the hedgehog receptor, Smoothened (Smo), on chemotherapy response in ovarian cancer. Expression of hedg...

The human PTCH2 gene is highly similar to PTCH1, a tumour suppressor gene frequently mutated in basal cell carcinoma and several other tumour types. PTCH1 is a transmembrane protein believed to inhibit another transmembrane protein SMO (Smoothened), which mediates HH (Hedgehog) signalling. In this study, we analysed the biological properties of several PTCH2 splice variants. An mRNA form that l...

OBJECTIVE To investigate the burden and causes of life-threatening maternal complications and the quality of emergency obstetric care in Nigerian public tertiary hospitals. DESIGN Nationwide cross-sectional study. SETTING Forty-two tertiary hospitals. POPULATION Women admitted for pregnancy, childbirth and puerperal complications. METHODS All cases of severe maternal outcome (SMO: mater...

OBJECTIVE The present study sought to determine whether the Hedgehog (Hh) pathway is active and regulates the cell growth of cultured malignant pleural mesothelioma (MPM) cells and to evaluate the efficacy of pathway blockade using smoothened (SMO) antagonists (SMO inhibitor GDC-0449 or the antifungal drug itraconazole [ITRA]) or Gli inhibitors (GANT61 or the antileukemia drug arsenic trioxide ...

Sonic hedgehog signaling is important for human development, and aberrant regulation of this pathway can result in the development of tumors. The aim of this study was to examine the expression of sonic hedgehog signaling molecules in oral squamous cell carcinoma. By quantitative real-time polymerase chain reaction, the expression of SHH, SMO, PTCH-1, and GLI-1 was analyzed in 30 oral squamous ...

OBJECTIVE to analyse the impact of in-hospital care on severe maternal morbidity using WHO's near-miss approach in the low-resource, high mortality setting of Zanzibar's referral hospital. SETTING Mnazi Mmoja Hospital, a tertiary care facility, in Zanzibar, Tanzania. METHODS We identified all cases of morbidity and mortality in women admitted within 42 days after the end of pregnancy at Mna...

The hedgehog pathway has been implicated in the formation and maintenance of a variety of malignancies, including ovarian cancer; however, it is unknown whether hedgehog signaling is involved in ovarian cancer chemoresistance. The goal of this study was to determine the effects of antagonizing the hedgehog receptor, Smoothened (Smo), on chemotherapy response in ovarian cancer. Expression of hed...

The receptor tyrosine kinase (RTK) MuSK is part of the receptor complex that initiates neuromuscular junction formation in response to agrin [1–3]. MuSK, as well as the related orphan RTK-like proteins Ror1 and Ror2 [4], and their homologs in lower organisms, have an extracellular region composed of varying combinations of immunoglobulin and Kringle domains, but they all also have a domain defi...

This thesis presents a new approach to the calibration of hydrologic models using distributed computing framework. Distributed hydrologic models are known to be very computationally intensive and difficult to calibrate. To cope with the high computational cost of the process a Surrogate Model Optimization(SMO) technique built for distributed computing facilities is proposed. The proposed method...