Levocetirizine is an effective treatment in patients suffering from chronic idiopathic urticaria: a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled, parallel, multicenter study

BACKGROUND: Chronic idiopathic urticaria (CIU) is defined by the almost daily presence of urticaria for at least 6 weeks without an identifiable cause. Symptoms include short-lived wheals, itching, and erythema. CIU impedes significantly a patient's quality of life (QoL). Levocetirizine is an antihistamine from the latest generation approved for CIU. AIM: To investigate the efficacy of levocetirizine, 5 mg, and placebo for the symptoms and signs of CIU, as well as for the QoL and productivity. METHODS: The primary criteria of evaluation were the pruritus severity scores over 1 week of treatment and over 4 weeks. The QoL was assessed via the Dermatology Life Quality Index (DLQI). RESULTS: Baseline pruritus severity scores were comparable in the two treatment groups (2.06+/-0.58). After 1 week, levocetirizine was superior to placebo and demonstrated a considerable efficacy (difference=0.78, P<0.001). This efficacy was maintained over the entire study period (4 weeks, P<0.001). The number and size of wheals were considerably reduced compared with placebo over 1 week and over the total treatment period (P paralleled by an improvement in the QoL (DLQI: 7.3 units in the levocetirizine group and 2.4 units in the placebo group) and a higher productivity at work in the levocetirizine group (3.0 workdays lost per patient per month in the placebo group, 0.3 in the levocetirizine group). No unexpected adverse events occurred. CONCLUSIONS: Levocetirizine, 5 mg once daily, is an effective treatment for CIU, characterized not only by a rapid and sustained response, but also by an important improvement in QoL.

Antibiotic-dependent correlation between drug-induced killing and loss of luminescence in Streptococcus gordonii expressing luciferase

Measuring antibiotic-induced killing relies on time-consuming biological tests. The firefly luciferase gene (luc) was successfully used as a reporter gene to assess antibiotic efficacy rapidly in slow-growing Mycobacterium tuberculosis. We tested whether luc expression could also provide a rapid evaluation of bactericidal drugs in Streptococcus gordonii. The suicide vectors pFW5luc and a modified version of pJDC9 carrying a promoterless luc gene were used to construct transcriptional-fusion mutants. One mutant susceptible to penicillin-induced killing (LMI2) and three penicillin-tolerant derivatives (LMI103, LMI104, and LMI105) producing luciferase under independent streptococcal promoters were tested. The correlation between antibiotic-induced killing and luminescence was determined with mechanistically unrelated drugs. Chloramphenicol (20 times the MIC) inhibited bacterial growth. In parallel, luciferase stopped increasing and remained stable, as determined by luminescence and Western blots. Ciprofloxacin (200 times the MIC) rapidly killed 1.5 log10 CFU/ml in 2-4 hr. Luminescence decreased simultaneously by 10-fold. In contrast, penicillin (200 times the MIC) gave discordant results. Although killing was slow (< or = 0.5 log10 CFU/ml in 2 hr), luminescence dropped abruptly by 50-100-times in the same time. Inactivating penicillin with penicillinase restored luminescence, irrespective of viable counts. This was not due to altered luciferase expression or stability, suggesting some kind of post-translational modification. Luciferase shares homology with aminoacyl-tRNA synthetase and acyl-CoA ligase, which might be regulated by macromolecule synthesis and hence affected in penicillin-inhibited cells. Because of resemblance, luciferase might be down-regulated simultaneously. Luminescence cannot be universally used to predict antibiotic-induced killing. Thus, introducing reporter enzymes sharing mechanistic similarities with normal metabolic reactions might reveal other effects than those expected.

Parallel evolution of facial stripe patterns in the Neolamprologus brichardilpulcher species complex endemic to Lake Tanganyika

Colour pattern diversity can be due to random processes or to natural or sexual selection. Consequently, similarities in colour patterns are not always correlated with common ancestry, but may result from convergent evolution under shared selection pressures or drift. Neolamprologus brichardi and Neolamprologus pulcher have been described as two distinct species based on differences in the arrangement of two dark bars on the operculum. Our study uses DNA sequences of the mitochondrial control region to show that relatedness of haplotypes disagrees with species assignment based on head colour pattern. This suggests repeated parallel evolution of particular stripe patterns. The complete lack of shared haplotypes between populations of the same or different phenotypes reflects strong philopatric behaviour, possibly induced by the cooperative breeding mode in which offspring remain in their natal territory and serve as helpers until they disperse to nearby territories or take over a breeding position. Concordant phylogeographic patterns between N. brichardi/N. pulcher populations and other rock-dwelling cichlids suggest that the same colonization routes have been taken by sympatric species and that these routes were affected by lake level fluctuations in the past. (C) 2007 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Analysis and performance of a UPC implementation of a parallel longest common subsequence algorithm

An important problem in computational biology is finding the longest common subsequence (LCS) of two nucleotide sequences. This paper examines the correctness and performance of a recently proposed parallel LCS algorithm that uses successor tables and pruning rules to construct a list of sets from which an LCS can be easily reconstructed. Counterexamples are given for two pruning rules that were given with the original algorithm. Because of these errors, performance measurements originally reported cannot be validated. The work presented here shows that speedup can be reliably achieved by an implementation in Unified Parallel C that runs on an Infiniband cluster. This performance is partly facilitated by exploiting the software cache of the MuPC runtime system. In addition, this implementation achieved speedup without bulk memory copy operations and the associated programming complexity of message passing.

Parallel algorithm for solving integer linear programs

Linear programs, or LPs, are often used in optimization problems, such as improving manufacturing efficiency of maximizing the yield from limited resources. The most common method for solving LPs is the Simplex Method, which will yield a solution, if one exists, but over the real numbers. From a purely numerical standpoint, it will be an optimal solution, but quite often we desire an optimal integer solution. A linear program in which the variables are also constrained to be integers is called an integer linear program or ILP. It is the focus of this report to present a parallel algorithm for solving ILPs. We discuss a serial algorithm using a breadth-first branch-and-bound search to check the feasible solution space, and then extend it into a parallel algorithm using a client-server model. In the parallel mode, the search may not be truly breadth-first, depending on the solution time for each node in the solution tree. Our search takes advantage of pruning, often resulting in super-linear improvements in solution time. Finally, we present results from sample ILPs, describe a few modifications to enhance the algorithm and improve solution time, and offer suggestions for future work.