Flt3-ligand (Flt3-L) is an early acting costimulatory cytokine that has been shown to possess antitumor properties in murine solid tumor models. Flt3-L is a trans-membrane protein (tm) but can be proteolytically cleaved to a soluble form, which is also biologically active. In this study, the antitumor effect of both soluble and tmFlt3-L was evaluated in a mouse leukemia model. To mimic the mult...

We investigated the contributions of intrinsic disease of the airways, loss of lung recoil and enhanced airway collapsibility to the airflow obstruction of 17 patients with chronic bronchitis and emphysema. Airways conductance at low flow (G(aw)), maximum expiratory flow (V(E, MAX)) and static lung recoil pressure [P(st) (l)] were measured at different lung volumes, and conductance-static recoi...

We developed a method for measuring airway resistance (R(aw)) in mice that does not require a measurement of airway flow. An analysis of R(aw) induced by alveolar gas compression showed the following relationship for an animal breathing spontaneously in a closed box: R(aw) = A(bt)V(b)/[V(t) (V(e) + 0.5V(t))]. Here A(bt) is the area under the box pressure-time curve during inspiration or expirat...

BACKGROUND American Thoracic Society (ATS) guidelines for methacholine challenge testing (MCT) discuss specific airways conductance (sG(aw)) as a surrogate marker for forced expiratory volume in the first second (FEV(1)) to diagnose airways obstruction. The guidelines suggest a cutoff value of 45% drop in sG(aw) to diagnose a positive MCT. However, there is no available evidence that supports t...

Consider a finite alphabet Ω and strings consisting of elements from Ω. For a given string w, let cor(w) denote the autocorrelation, which can be seen as a measure of the amount of overlap in w. Furthermore, let aw(n) be the number of strings of length n that do not contain w as a substring. Eriksson [4] stated the following conjecture: if cor(w)>cor(w�), then aw(n)>aw�(n) from the first n wher...