Late pregnancy screening for preeclampsia with a urinary point-of-care test for misfolded proteins.

The aim was to describe and assess a new late pregnancy point-of-care urinary preeclampsia screening test. Urine samples were collected from a consecutive series of 1,532 pregnant women hospitalized at 20-41 weeks gestation in a Chinese single obstetric unit. A simple disposable Congo red based device was newly developed and employed to prospectively test misfolded proteins in pregnant women's urine. A total of 140 preeclampsia cases were clinically diagnosed, 101 severe and 87 pre-term. Detection and false positive rates were similar in the training and validation subsets with combined 74% and 3.0%. The detection rate was 83% in severe, 86% in pre-term, 49% and 50% in mild and term cases (P<0.0001) respectively. In conclusion, a simple point-of-care urinary test for misfolded proteins can be used to screen for preeclampsia in late pregnancy with very high screening performance. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to screen for preeclampsia using Congo red based device in Chinese pregnant population.

T-18, a stemonamide synthetic intermediate inhibits Pim kinase activity and induces cell apoptosis, acting as a potent anticancer drug.

Pim-3 kinase has been shown to be aberrantly expressed in premalignant and malignant lesions of endoderm-derived organs such as the liver, pancreas, colon and stomach. Pim-3 kinase inactivates the Bad protein, a proapoptotic molecule, and improves the expression of Bcl-xL, an antiapoptotic molecule, to promote cell proliferation. Thus, blocking Pim-3 kinase activity may be a new strategy for the treatment of pancreatic cancer. In this study, we screened low molecular compounds and observed that the stemonamide synthetic intermediate, T-18, potently inhibited Pim kinase activity. Moreover, T-18 inhibited the proliferation of human pancreatic, as well as that of hepatocellular and colon cancer cells in vitro. It also induced the apoptosis of human pancreatic carcinoma cells in vitro by decreasing the levels of phospho-Ser112-Bad; the levels of Pim-3 kinase and total Bad protein were not altered. Furthermore, T-18 inhibited the growth of human pancreatic cancer cells in nude mice without apparent adverse effects when the tumor was palpable. These observations indicate that stemonamide synthetic intermediates may be novel drugs for the treatment of gastrointestinal cancers, particularly pancreatic cancer.