Renewed hope

Ascorbic Acid in Cancer: A Renewed Hope?

Ascorbic acid (AA), long known to treat scurvy, has had debatable use as an anti-neoplastic drug in the past. However recent in vitro and in vivo studies have revealed previously unexplored mechanisms through which AA selectively damages cancer cells without causing damage to normal cells. In view of newly emerging evidence, many clinical trials have been designed to study these effects in pati...

High-dose vitamin C therapy: renewed hope or false promise?

Challenges of antiangiogenic cancer therapy: trials and errors, and renewed hope

Angiogenesis inhibition has been proposed as a general strategy to fight cancer. However, in spite of the promising preclinical results, a first generation of antiangiogenic compounds yielded poor results in clinical trials. Conceptual errors and mistakes in the design of trials and in the definition of clinical end-points could account for these negative results. In this context of discouragin...

Child survival: a message of hope but a call for renewed commitment in UNICEF report

A recent UNICEF report Committing to Child Survival: A Promise Renewed Progress Report 2013 presents a comprehensive analysis of levels and trends in child mortality and progress towards MDG 4. The global under-five mortality rate has been cut nearly in half (47%) since 1990. However, during this same period, 216 million children are estimated to have died before their fifth birthday. Most of t...

Renewed Hope for Data Parallelism: Unintegrated Support for Task Parallelism in ZPL

This paper suggests that data parallelism is more general than previously thought and that integrating support for task parallelism into a data parallel programming language is a mistake. With several proposed improvements, the data parallel programming language ZPL is surprisingly versatile. The language and its power are illustrated by the solution to several traditionally task parallel probl...