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The identification of patient-specific tumor antigens is complicated by the low frequency of T cells specific for each tumor antigen. Here we describe NeoScreen, a method that enables the sensitive identification of rare tumor (neo)antigens and of cognate T cell receptors (TCRs) expressed by tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes. T cells transduced with tumor antigen-specific TCRs identified by NeoScreen mediate regression of established tumors in patient-derived xenograft mice. NeoScreen helps identify rare tumor antigens for personalized cancer vaccines and T cell therapies.

Currently, ascorbic acid (AA) is widely used as a skin whitening material, but, AA, an unstable hydrophilic molecule, cannot penetrate the skin easily, due to the hydrophobic character of the stratum corneum. Therefore, we conjugated AA with hydrated zinc oxide—an inorganic matrix with positive surface charge, to improve the stability of AA. The metal-conjugated-ascorbic acid (ZnAA) was then combined with yeast vacuole through the vacuolar membrane proteins that relate to metal transportation to create an enhanced vacuole that contained ZnAA. The characteristics of vacuole with ZnAA (ZnAA_Vac) were next examined by various tests that included X-ray diffraction (XRD), Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FT–IR), Field emission scanning electron microscopy (FE–SEM), and energy-dispersive X-ray (EDX) analysis. Furthermore, the ability of ZnAA_Vac to degrade melanin was confirmed in both melanoma cell line B16F10, and the artificial human skin MelanoDerm. The results showed that ZnAA_Vac possessed a higher depigmenting effect than the wild-type vacuole or ascorbic acid by reducing 75% of melanin color. Interestingly, ZnAA_Vac was found to be harmless, and did not cause any cytotoxicity to the cells. Overall, ZnAA_Vac is expected to provide a robust, harmless, and effective whitening agent for the skin.

The SARC-F questionnaire has been developed as a rapid diagnostic test that can be used to screen for sarcopenia. To investigate the reliability and validity of the Vietnamese version of SARC-F as a screening tool for sarcopenia in older patients in Vietnam. A cross-sectional study was conducted in older people attending the outpatient clinics of the National Geriatric Hospital in Vietnam. Muscle mass (using dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry), handgrip strength and gait speed were assessed. SARC-F was validated against the three standard criteria for sarcopenia: the Foundation for the National Institutes of Health (FNIH), Asia Working Group for Sarcopenia (AWGS 2019) and European Working Group on Sarcopenia in Older People (EWGSOP2). There were 764 participants (mean age 71.5 ± 8.9 years). The Vietnamese SARC-F questionnaire had a good internal consistency (Cronbach's alpha 0.85). The prevalence of sarcopenia was 49.2% according to SARC-F and 48.3%, 61.1% and 52.6% according to FNIH, AWGS 2019 and EWGSOP2, respectively. The sensitivity and specificity of SARC-F in identifying sarcopenia were 67.1% and 66.7% (for FINH), 66.7% and 67.1% (for AWGS 2019), and 64.9% and 68.2% (for EWGSOP2). The AUCs of SARC-F were 0.71-0.72 against the three sarcopenia criteria. The Vietnamese version of SARC-F questionnaire has acceptable diagnostic value for sarcopenia. SARC-F could be used as an initial screening for sarcopenia in hospital clinics.

The Qinghai–Tibet Plateau (QTP) plays a crucial role in the terrestrial carbon cycle, but the gross primary productivity (GPP) estimates for the region remain highly uncertain due to limited flux observations and modeling challenges. Here, we integrated 65.2 site years of eddy covariance data from 19 flux sites with multi-source remote sensing observations to develop a data driven GPP model for the QTP. Eleven machine learning algorithms from two automated machine learning (AutoML) platforms, H2O AutoML and FLAML, were evaluated to construct an ensemble model named AutoML. The model showed strong performance at site-level across alpine meadow, steppe, wetland, and shrub ecosystems, achieving R2 up to 0.95 and RMSE as low as 0.42 g C m−2 d−1. By validating extracted site-level GPP values from the upscaling GPP datasets against with flux observations, AutoML-GPP demonstrates overall superior or equivalent performance over global GPP products (FLUXCOM X-base, GOSIF, and FluxSat). Regional upscaling estimated a mean annual total GPP of 374.20 Tg C yr−1 from 2002 to 2018, with a slight upward trend of 0.08 Tg C yr−1. Spatially, higher GPP occurred mainly in the eastern QTP, with anomalies linked to climate extremes in 2008, 2010, and 2015. AutoML-GPP effectively captures climate-induced interannual anomalies in the QTP’s GPP, coinciding with GOSIF-GPP and FluxSat GPP, and outperforming the recent released well-known global upscaling flux dataset FLUXCOM X-base. This study provides improved GPP estimation for the QTP, offering new insights into carbon cycling and climate–vegetation interactions.

There has been limited evidence about frailty in older patients with acute coronary syndrome (ACS) in Vietnam. (1) To investigate the prevalence of frailty in older patients hospitalised with ACS and its associated factors; (2) To investigate the impact of frailty on percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) and adverse outcomes in this population. Patients aged ≥60 with ACS admitted to two teaching hospitals in Vietnam were recruited from 9/2017 to 4/2018. Frailty was defined by the Reported Edmonton Frail Scale. Multivariate logistic regression was applied to investigate the associated factors of frailty and the impact of frailty on PCI and adverse outcomes. There were 324 participants, mean age 73.5±8.3, 39.2% female. The prevalence of frailty was 48.1%. Advanced age, female gender, history of hypertension, heart failure, stroke and chronic kidney disease were significantly associated with a frailty status. Overall, 50.3% of the participants received PCI (58.3% in the non-frail vs 41.7% in the frail, p=0.003). However, frailty did not have an independent impact on PCI (adjusted OR 0.66, 95% CI 0.41-1.08). Frailty was significantly associated with increased risk of having arrhythmia during hospitalisation (adjusted OR 2.24, 95% CI 1.32-3.80), hospital-acquired pneumonia (adjusted OR 2.27, 95% CI 1.24-4.17), in-hospital mortality (adjusted OR 3.02, 95% CI 1.35-6.75), 30-day mortality (adjusted OR 3.28, 95% CI 1.59-6.76), and 30-day readmission (adjusted OR 2.53, 95% CI 1.38-4.63). In this study, frailty was present in nearly half of older patients with ACS and was associated with increased adverse outcomes. These findings suggest that frailty screening should be performed in older patients with ACS in Vietnam.

Satellite systems have been integrating into worldwide networks to improve the quality of services, including mobility, reliability, and coverage. Such systems offer tremendous advantages to end users at any times, places, and circumstances, but raise significant security risks due to the inherent weaknesses of data transmission via radio signals. The existing studies only focus on the connections between users and the network control center while end-to-end communications with space segments have not yet fully considered. In this study, we propose a user-to-user anonymous authenticated key agreement protocol for mobile satellite communications. Multiple factors, including a user’s biometric, password, smart card, secret identity, and a public identity are utilized to strengthen system security. The scheme also employs the biohashing code and Hamming distance to encode sensitive data and to verify user’s inputs. Short-term tokens are exploited to facilitate users to authenticate and negotiate session keys directly with other end users and application servers. Hence, not only can our scheme withstand all known attacks, but it also provides the systems with several desired properties, including user’s access control, revocations, biometric error resistance, and long-term secret updates.

Session Initial Protocol (SIP) has been widely adopted for signaling and controlling interactive sessions in multimedia communication networks. Despite its various advantages compared to predecessor protocols, the security and privacy of the SIP remain challenges due to the risk of real-world public networks. While most SIP applications utilize end-to-end communications, existing studies mainly focus on client-server protocols. In this study, we propose a novel SIP authenticated key agreement protocol for all user-server, user-user, and group communications. An end user employs a short-term token to communicate with either end-users or multimedia servers without connecting to a trusted server. Our security analyzes show that the scheme not only resists all known attacks, but provides the system with many desirable features, including direct end-to-end communications, preserving biometric template privacy, user access control, smart card revocation, and long-term secret updates. The latency of the authenticated key agreement phase is relatively small, and thus this signaling protocol is appropriate for a wide range of real-time applications.

Online access has been widely adopted to distribute diversified services to customers. In this architecture, public channels are utilized to exchange information between end users and remote servers at anytime and anywhere. To achieve confidentiality and integrity for transferred data, the related parties have to authenticate each other and negotiate a secret session key to encrypt and decrypt exchanged messages. Since the Lamport’s pioneering authentication work in 1981, numerous mechanisms have been proposed to enhance security as well as reduce computation and payload data. Recently, Chuang and Chen proposed a multi-server authenticated agreement protocol employing a smart card and biometric data to eliminate the weaknesses caused by parameters related to low-entropy human-memorable passwords that are stored in a physical location. However, Mishra et al. showed that Chuang and Chen’s protocol is not only vulnerable to multiple attacks but also suffers from the drawback of variation of biometric data. To overcome these weaknesses, they proposed an enhanced three-factor authenticated key agreement protocol using the low-error rate Biohashing technique. Unfortunately, we found that Mishra et al.’s scheme is also vulnerable to the denial-of-service attack, the traceable user attack, the impersonation attack, and the pre-shared key attack. Furthermore, the protocol does not provide any user revocation mechanism to control user accesses. In this novel untraceable authenticated key agreement scheme, we adopt the Hamming distance to verify encrypted Biohash codes and a public-key technique to construct the revocation mechanism. Our scheme achieves not only zero errors of biometric verification but also secure against all known attacks.

2-Nonenal is a long-chain aliphatic aldehyde containing nine carbons and an unsaturated bond. 2-Nonenal is the primary cause of odor associated with aging, with an unpleasant greasy and grassy odor. Lysosome, mitochondria, and peroxisome are significant organelles in eukaryotic cells that contain various hydrolases that degrade biomolecules. Proteins in mitochondria and peroxisome also contain aldehyde dehydrogenase. We performed trans-2-nonenal treatment using lysosomal-related enzymes extracted from hen egg white (HEW). As trans-2-nonenal is more structurally stable than cis-2-nonenal, it was selected as the target aldehyde. HEW contains various biologically active proteins and materials such as albumin, ovotransferrin, lysosome, peroxisome, and mitochondria. Here, complementary experiments were conducted to evaluate the role of lysosomal-related enzymes in the treatment of trans-2-nonenal. The activity of lysosomal-related enzymes was confirmed via antimicrobial test against E. coli . HPLC analysis was used to determine the reduction of trans-2-nonenal. The trans-2-nonenal treatment depended on the reaction time and enzyme concentration. Materials considered as an intermediate from trans-2-nonenal treatment were detected by GC/MS spectrometer. Under acidic conditions (pH 6), lysosomal-related enzymes were the most efficient in the treatment of trans-2-nonenal. Furthermore, based on differential pH testing, we found the conditions under which all the 50 ppm trans-2-nonenal was removed. Therefore, our results suggest that the lysosomal-related enzymes reduced trans-2-nonenal, suggesting clinical application as anti-aging deodorants.

It is of great challenge to accurately predict flash floods for small to medium catchments (SMC) in mountainous areas, for which parameter calibration strategies are crucial for model performance. This study investigates the influence of calibration parameter selection on flash flood simulations using a rainfall–runoff model, MISDc-2L (Modello Idrologico Semi-Distribuito in continuo–2 layers), at hourly scale for SMC in the Huai River basin of China over the 2010–2015 period. We investigated model performances under different calibration schemes, where different amounts of model parameters were selected for the calibration procedure. The model clearly performed better in the case involving calibration of partial sensitive parameters than that of a full parameter set with respect to the peaks, the hydrographs and the base-flow of flood simulation, especially after including maximum water capacity (W_max) in the calibration. This finding was consistently valid under different model calibration experiments, including single event, “split-sample” test and combined events at different flood magnitude levels. We further found that the model performed better for high magnitude flood events than medium and low ones, but clear improvements can be achieved for low and medium magnitude flood events with careful calibration parameter selection. Our study suggests that calibration parameter selection is important for flash flood event simulations with the MISDc-2L model for SMC in the Huai River basin of China; specifically, the reduction in calibration parameter amount and the inclusion of W_max in calibration remarkably improve flood simulation.