Cell-wall skeleton prepared from Mycobacterium bovis BCG (BCG-CWS) is known as a potent adjuvant and has been shown to possess antitumor activity in many non-clinical and clinical studies. As there are no approved BCG-CWS formulations for cancer therapy, we investigated the potential for cancer immunotherapy of SMP-105, our originally produced BCG-CWS. For optimizing SMP-105 emulsion, we compar...

Diabetic nephropathy is currently the most common cause of end-stage renal disease. Diabetic nephropathy patients, whether insulin dependent or not, develop fibrotic changes in glomeruli that manifest as overt nephropathy. Previously, we demonstrated that 5-chloro-2-{(1E)-3-[2-(4-methoxybenzoyl)-4-methyl-1H-pyrrol-1-yl]prop-1-en-1-yl}-N-(methylsulfonyl)benzamide (SMP-534) reduces extracellular ...

The basic processing element, from PCs to large systems, is rapidly becoming a symmetric multiprocessor (SMP). As a result, the nodes of a parallel computer will often be an SMP. The resulting mixed hardware models (combining shared-memory and distributed memory) provide a challenge to system software developers to provide users with programming models that are portable, understandable, and eff...

PC-CLUMP (Cluster of Multiprocessor) is one of the most cost-e ective commodity-based platforms for HPC applications. The increasing number of CPUs per SMP node realizes very compact system size and very low price on the network interface per processor keeping the number of CPUs in the system. However, the performance of SMP-bus on such an SMPPC node is relatively poor compared with that of SMP...

INTRODUCTION The purpose of this study was to determine the impact of the Health Foundation's Co-Creating Health (CCH) group self-management programme (SMP) for adult patients with type 2 diabetes on patient activation and quality of life. MATERIAL AND METHODS We conducted a multisite longitudinal study of 283 patients (mean age 62.3 years, SD 11.1; 43% ethnic minority; 51% female). Primary o...

Maintenance helps to extend equipment life by improving its condition and avoiding catastrophic failures. Appropriate model or mechanism is, thus, needed to quantify system availability vis-a-vis a given maintenance strategy, which will assist in decision-making for optimal utilization of maintenance resources. This paper deals with semi-Markov process (SMP) modeling for steady state availabili...

The effectiveness of Special Master's Programs (SMPs) in benefiting a potential medical student's career beyond admission into an MD-program is largely unknown. This study aims to evaluate the role of SMPs, if any, in affecting the performance and outcomes of students during their medical school career. This study analyzed anonymous surveys of students and residents from the University of Toled...

Introduction The diversity of the human genome is a decisive factor in the causation and pathogenesis of complex disease as well as for the individual response to biologically active substances (pharmacogenomics). A key step in all strategies for disease gene identification is the comparative sequence analysis of candidate genes in patients and controls to identify those specific sequence varia...