Does Telotristat Have a Role in Preventing Carcinoid Heart Disease?

Carcinoid heart disease (CHD) is a frequent and life-threatening complication in patients with carcinoid tumors. Its clinical management is challenging is some cases since serotonin-induced valve fibrosis leads to heart failure. Telotristat is an inhibitor of tryptophan-hydroxylase (TPH), a key enzyme in serotonin production. Telotristat use in patients with carcinoid syndrome and uncontrollable diarrhea under somatostatin analogs is approved, but its specific role in patients with CHD is still not clear. IN this context, we aimed to explore the effect of telotristat in heart fibrosis using a mouse model of serotonin-secreting metastasized neuroendocrine neoplasm (NEN). To this aim, four treatment groups (n = 10/group) were evaluated: control, monthly octreotide, telotristat alone, and telotristat combined with octreotide. Plasma serotonin and NT-proBNP levels were determined. Heart fibrosis was histologically evaluated after 6 weeks of treatment or when an individual mouse's condition was close to being terminal. Heart fibrosis was observed in all groups. Non-significant reductions in primary tumor growth were observed in all of the treated groups. Feces volume was increased in all groups. A non-significant decrease in feces volume was observed in the octreotide or telotristat-treated groups, while it was significantly reduced with the combined treatment at the end of the study compared with octreotide (52 g reduction; p < 0.01) and the control (44.5 g reduction; p = 0.05). Additionally, plasma NT-proBNP decreased in a non-significant, but clinically relevant, manner in the octreotide (28.2% reduction), telotristat (45.9% reduction), and the octreotide + telotristat (54.1% reduction) treatment groups. No significant changes were observed in plasma serotonin levels. A similar non-significant decrease in heart valve fibrosis was observed in the three treated groups. In conclusion, Telotristat alone and especially in combination with octreotide decreases NT-proBNP levels in a mouse model of serotonin-secreting metastasized NEN, when compared with the control and octreotide, but its effect on heart valve fibrosis (alone and in combination) was not superior to octreotide in monotherapy.

Execution data logs of a supercomputer workload over its extended lifetime.

The data of this research describes the logged usage of the Euler cluster located at CIEMAT (Centre for Energy, Environment, and Technology Research), spanning the period between November 2008 and March 2018. The Euler database is open access in Parallel Workload Archive format, available from the PWA repository [1] and Mendeley Data [2], allowing in this way a whole new bunch of research possibilities on computer science.

Characterization of antigenetic serotypes from the dengue virus in Venezuela by means of Grid Computing.

This work determines the molecular epidemiology of dengue virus in Venezuela by means of phylogenetic calculations performed on the EELA-2 Grid infrastructure with the PhyloGrid application, an open source tool that allows users performing phylogeny reconstruction in their research. In this study, a total of 132 E nucleotide gene sequences of dengue virus from Venezuela recorded in GenBank(R) have been processed in order to reproduce and validate the topology described in the literature.

The evolution of HPV by means of a phylogenetic study.

In this work we demonstrate the adequacy of revising the classification systems based on molecular phylogenetic calculations by allowing an arbitrary number of taxas that take advantage of high performance computing platforms for the Human papillomavirus (HPV) case. To do so, we have analysed several phylogenetic trees which have been calculated with the PhyloGrid tool, a workflow developed in the framework of the EELA-2 Project.