Metastatic Cells Will Take Any Help They Can Get

Metastatic cells will take any help they can get.

Two recent papers in Cancer Cell (Lu et al., this issue of Cancer Cell, and Kang et al.) illustrate means whereby acquisition of VCAM-1 by tumor cells can promote metastasis. First, monocyte/macrophages expressing α4 integrin bind VCAM-1 and provide survival signals enhancing establishment of metastases. Second, VCAM-1 allows dormant tumor cells to interact with osteoclasts, yielding paracrine ...

Relapses of sarcoidosis: what are they and can we predict who will get them?

Granulomatous inflammation in the lung may occur from a variety of causes. Many of these are the result of specific antigens that reach the lung and induce a granulomatous response. A prototype of this schema is pulmonary tuberculosis where the organism serves as the inciting antigen. Treatment of tuberculosis is aimed at killing and clearing the organism. It would be foolhardy and potentially ...

Dendritic cells--why can they help and hurt us.

Dendritic cells (DCs) show a Janus-like functional behavior. They help us by their orchestration of numerous immune responses to defend our body against invading pathogenic micro-organisms and also induce regulatory T cells to inhibit immune reactions against autoantigens as well as diverse harmless environmental antigens. However, DCs can also be of harm to us when misguided by their microenvi...

Will they come and will they stay?

German Compounds and Statistical Machine Translation. Can they get along?

This paper reports different experiments created to study the impact of using linguistics to preprocess German compounds prior to translation in Statistical Machine Translation (SMT). Compounds are a known challenge both in Machine Translation (MT) and Translation in general as well as in other Natural Language Processing (NLP) applications. In the case of SMT, German compounds are split into t...