Oral vaccination with a recombinant Lactobacillus plantarum expressing the Eimeria tenella rhoptry neck 2 protein elicits protective immunity in broiler chickens infected with Eimeria tenella.

BACKGROUND: Chicken coccidiosis is a protozoan disease that leads to considerable economic losses in the poultry industry. Live oocyst vaccination is currently the most effective measure for the prevention of coccidiosis. However, it provides limited protection with several drawbacks, such as poor immunological protection and potential reversion to virulence. Therefore, the development of effective and safe vaccines against chicken coccidiosis is still urgently needed. METHODS: In this study, a novel oral vaccine against Eimeria tenella was developed by constructing a recombinant Lactobacillus plantarum (NC8) strain expressing the E. tenella RON2 protein. We administered recombinant L. plantarum orally at 3, 4 and 5 days of age and again at 17, 18 and 19 days of age. Meanwhile, each chick in the commercial vaccine group was immunized with 3 × 102 live oocysts of coccidia. A total of 5 × 104 sporulated oocysts of E. tenella were inoculated in each chicken at 30 days. Then, the immunoprotection effect was evaluated after E. tenella infection. RESULTS: The results showed that the proportion of CD4+ and CD8+ T cells, the proliferative ability of spleen lymphocytes, inflammatory cytokine levels and specific antibody titers of chicks immunized with recombinant L. plantarum were significantly increased (P < 0.05). The relative body weight gains were increased and the number of oocysts per gram (OPG) was decreased after E. tenella challenge. Moreover, the lesion scores and histopathological cecum sections showed that recombinant L. plantarum can significantly relieve pathological damage in the cecum. The ACI was 170.89 in the recombinant L. plantarum group, which was higher than the 150.14 in the commercial vaccine group. CONCLUSIONS: These above results indicate that L. plantarum expressing RON2 improved humoral and cellular immunity and enhanced immunoprotection against E. tenella. The protective efficacy was superior to that of vaccination with the commercial live oocyst vaccine. This study suggests that recombinant L. plantarum expressing the RON2 protein provides a promising strategy for vaccine development against coccidiosis.

Lycium barbarum polysaccharide promotes the immunoprotective effects of a recombinant Lactobacillus plantarum vaccine expressing the Trichinella spiralis cathepsin F-like protease 1 gene.

Trichinellosis caused by Trichinella spiralis (T. spiralis) is a zoonotic disease that poses a substantial risk to human health. At present, vaccines used to prevent trichinellosis are effective, but the production of antibody levels and immunogenicity are low. Adjuvants can increase antibody levels and vaccine immunogenicity. As a result, it is critical to develop an effective adjuvant for the T. spiralis vaccine. Recent research has shown that traditional Chinese medicine polysaccharides with low-toxicity and biodegradability can act as adjuvants in vaccines. In this study, BALB/c mice were orally inoculated with a recombinant Lactobacillus plantarum (L. plantarum) vaccine expressing the T. spiralis cathepsin F-like protease 1 gene (rTs-CPF1), which was given three times at 10-day intervals. Lycium barbarum polysaccharide (LBP) was administered orally for 37 days. At 37 days after the first immunization, mice were infected with 350 T. spiralis muscle larvae (ML). Specific IgG and sIgA antibody levels against the T. spiralis CPF1 protein were increased in mice immunized with rTs-CPF1+LBP compared to those immunized with rTs-CPF1 alone. Furthermore, LBP increased IFN-γ and IL-4 expression levels, and the number of intestinal and intramuscular worms was significantly reduced in the rTs-CPF1+LBP group compared to that in the rTs-CPF1 group. In the rTs-CPF1+LBP group, the reduction rates of adult worms and muscle larvae were 47.31 % and 68.88 %, respectively. To summarize, LBP promotes the immunoprotective effects of the T. spiralis vaccine and may be considered as a novel adjuvant in parasitic vaccines.

Adversarial neural network with sentiment-aware attention for detecting adverse drug reactions.

Adverse drug reaction (ADR) detection is an important issue in drug safety. ADRs are health threats caused by medication. Identifying ADRs in a timely manner can reduce harm to patients and can also assist doctors in the rational use of drugs. Many studies have investigated potential ADRs based on social media due to the openness and timeliness of this resource; however, they have ignored the fine-grained emotional expression in social media text. In addition, the benchmark datasets from social media are usually small, which can result in the problem of over-fitting. In this paper, we propose the Adversarial Neural Network with Sentiment-aware Attention (ANNSA) model, which enhances the sentimental element in social media and improves the performance of neural networks via data augmentation. Specifically, a sentiment-aware attention mechanism is proposed to extract the word-level sentiment features associated with sentiment words and learn task-related information by optimizing a task-specific loss. For low-resource datasets, we use an adversarial training approach to generate perturbations of the word embeddings via an implicit regularization technique. ANNSA was tested on three social media ADR detection datasets, namely, Twitter, TwiMed (Twitter) and CADEC. The experimental results indicated the ability to achieve F1 values of 48.84%, 64.18% and 83.06%, respectively, comparable to the best results reported for state-of-the-art methods. Our study demonstrates that sentiment words are highly correlated with ADRs and that word-level sentiment features can assist in detecting ADRs from social media datasets.

Adverse drug reaction detection via a multihop self-attention mechanism.

BACKGROUND: The adverse reactions that are caused by drugs are potentially life-threatening problems. Comprehensive knowledge of adverse drug reactions (ADRs) can reduce their detrimental impacts on patients. Detecting ADRs through clinical trials takes a large number of experiments and a long period of time. With the growing amount of unstructured textual data, such as biomedical literature and electronic records, detecting ADRs in the available unstructured data has important implications for ADR research. Most of the neural network-based methods typically focus on the simple semantic information of sentence sequences; however, the relationship of the two entities depends on more complex semantic information. METHODS: In this paper, we propose multihop self-attention mechanism (MSAM) model that aims to learn the multi-aspect semantic information for the ADR detection task. first, the contextual information of the sentence is captured by using the bidirectional long short-term memory (Bi-LSTM) model. Then, via applying the multiple steps of an attention mechanism, multiple semantic representations of a sentence are generated. Each attention step obtains a different attention distribution focusing on the different segments of the sentence. Meanwhile, our model locates and enhances various keywords from the multiple representations of a sentence. RESULTS: Our model was evaluated by using two ADR corpora. It is shown that the method has a stable generalization ability. Via extensive experiments, our model achieved F-measure of 0.853, 0.799 and 0.851 for ADR detection for TwiMed-PubMed, TwiMed-Twitter, and ADE, respectively. The experimental results showed that our model significantly outperforms other compared models for ADR detection. CONCLUSIONS: In this paper, we propose a modification of multihop self-attention mechanism (MSAM) model for an ADR detection task. The proposed method significantly improved the learning of the complex semantic information of sentences.

[The therapeutic effect of triamcinolone acetonide with Pingyangmycin on lymphatic malformations in oral and maxillofacial regions].

OBJECTIVE: To investigate the therapeutic effect of Triamcinolone Acetonide and Pingyangmycin on lymphatic malformations in oral and maxillofacial regions. METHODS: 29 patients with lymphatic malformations in oral and maxillofacial regions were divided into two groups to receive intra-lesion injection with Triamcinolone Acetonide and Pingyangmycin in experimental group, or with Pingyangmycin only in control group. The lesions involution and facial appearance were observed. RESULTS: 2 years after treatment, the volume of small cyst and micro-cyst type mass shrank to (3.7 +/- 0.3)% and (4.2 +/- 0.4)%, respectively in experimental group, while (15.4 +/- 1.3)% and (24.1 +/- 3.1)% in control group. The lesion involution was markedly obvious in experimental group. Compare with control group, the facial asymmetry was greatly improved in experimental group. CONCLUSIONS: Intra-lesion injection with Triamcinolone Acetonide and Pingyangmycin is an effective method for the treatment of lymphatic malformations in oral maxillofacial regions. The mass can be shrank markedly to improve facial symmetry.