1,721,248 research outputs found
Prognostic markers and putative therapeutic targets for hepatocellular carcinoma.
No full textMol Aspects Med. 2010 Apr;31(2):179-93. Epub 2010 Feb 20.
Prognostic markers and putative therapeutic targets for hepatocellular carcinoma.
Frau M, Biasi F, Feo F, Pascale RM.
Source
Department of Biomedical Sciences, Division of Experimental Pathology and Oncology, University of Sassari, 07100 Sassari, Italy.
Abstract
Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is the fifth most frequent human cancer and a fatal disease. Therapies with pharmacological agents do not improve the prognosis of patients with unresectable HCC. This emphasizes the need to identify new targets for early diagnosis, chemoprevention, and treatment of the disease. Available evidence indicates that clinical outcome of HCC could reflect the genetic predisposition to cancer development and progression. Numerous loci controlling HCC progression have been identified in rodents. In this review, we describe results of recent studies on effector mechanisms of susceptibility/resistance genes, responsible for HCC progression, aimed at identifying new putative prognostic markers and therapeutic targets of this tumor. Highest c-myc amplification and overexpression, alterations of iNOS crosstalk with IKK/NF-kB and RAS/ERK signaling, ubiquitination of ERK and cell cycle inhibitors, and deregulation of FOXM1 and cell cycle key genes occur in rapidly progressing dysplastic nodules and HCC, induced in genetic susceptible rat strains, compared to the lesions of resistant rats. Notably, alterations of these mechanisms in human HCC subtypes with poorer or better prognosis, are similar to those present in genetically susceptible and resistant rats, respectively, and function as prognostic markers and therapeutic targets. Attempts to cure advanced HCC by molecular therapy directed against specific targets led to modest survival benefit. Thus, efforts are necessary to identify and test, in pre-clinical and clinical studies, new therapeutic targets for combined molecular treatments of HCC. They may take advantage from the comparative analysis of signal transduction in HCCs differently prone to progress, in rats and humans
Legislative reforms to fight discrimination and violence against LGBTQ+: the failure of the Zan Bill in Italy
Full text linkDoomed to fail. The adoption of gendered party finance in Italy at an inhospitable time
Full text linkItaly stands out as one of the few countries in Europe to have introduced policies linking public funding for political parties to measures to enhance women’s political representation. However, such policies have proved to be flawed, failing to meet the objectives that they aimed to address. Starting from these observations, this paper opens the ‘black box’ of the policy cycle and analyses the stage of policy formulation that led to gendered party finance, to understand why such ill-defined measures were introduced in the first place. In order to do so we retrace, first, the ‘support structure’ for the adoption of gender representation policies, and identify the relevant elite arena in which the policy was initiated. Then, by analysing parliamentary votes and speeches, we analyse the alliances and the conflict that originated around the policy. We find that, if structural conditions prevented the adoption of a more intrusive policy, its poor design seems to have been the result of the weakness of the support structure for the introduction of feminist policies and of the lack of cross-party alliances among women MPs that might otherwise have promoted the legitimacy of affirmative action
Gendered patterns in candidates’ campaign fundraising : the case of Italy
Full text linkThe lack of financial resources is an often-cited hurdle for women pursuing political careers. However, empirical analysis of the dynamics of the private funding of women candidates and its potential implications for their political careers is still scant, particularly for countries outside the anglophone regions. This paper contributes to the scholarly debate by focusing on the gendered patterns in campaign fundraising in Italy, where radical changes to the party funding regime and multiple reforms to the electoral laws may have changed the structure of opportunity for fundraising by women candidates. We analyse patterns of private funding for men and women candidates in four national elections between 1996 and 2018. Our analysis, triangulated with semi-structured interviews with women candidates, shows that differences exist in fundraising patterns between male and female candidates in Italy. It reveals differences in the quality of candidates’ fundraising networks and confirms that political affiliation (to right-wing parties) and incumbency have an effect on the amount of donations received, thus granting women candidates greater access to private donations
Uniqueness of renormalized solutions to nonlinear parabolic problems with lower order terms
No full textIn this paper we prove uniqueness results for renormalized solutions to a class of nonlinear parabolic problems
Existence result for nonlinear parabolic equations with lower order terms
No full textWe study the existence of renormalized solutions of nonlinear parabolic problems with lower order terms and data in L^1
An eigenvalue problem for the anisotropic Φ-Laplacian
No full textWe study an eigenvalue problem involving a fully anisotropic elliptic differential operator in arbitrary Orlicz-Sobolev spaces. The relevant equations are associated with constrained minimization problems for integral functionals depending on the gradient of competing functions through general anisotropic N-functions. In particular, the latter need neither be radial, nor have a polynomial growth, and are not even assumed to satisfy the so called Δ2-condition. The resulting analysis requires the development of some new aspects of the theory of anisotropic Orlicz-Sobolev spaces
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