Drug Repurposing in Rare Diseases: An Integrative Study of Drug Screening and Transcriptomic Analysis in Nephropathic Cystinosis

Diagnosis and cure for rare diseases represent a great challenge for the scientific community who often comes up against the complexity and heterogeneity of clinical picture associated to a high cost and time-consuming drug development processes. Here we show a drug repurposing strategy applied to nephropathic cystinosis, a rare inherited disorder belonging to the lysosomal storage diseases. This approach consists in combining mechanism-based and cell-based screenings, coupled with an affordable computational analysis, which could result very useful to predict therapeutic responses at both molecular and system levels. Then, we identified potential drugs and metabolic pathways relevant for the pathophysiology of nephropathic cystinosis by comparing gene-expression signature of drugs that share common mechanisms of action or that involve similar pathways with the disease gene-expression signature achieved with RNA-seq.     

Nonverbal communication and physician–patient rapport: An empirical study.

Studied 71 medical residents and approximately 400 patients to examine the relationship between patients' satisfaction with the medical care they received from their physicians and the nonverbal skills of those physicians. Various aspects of the physicians' personalities were assessed with the Personality Research Form, and their nonverbal decoding skills were measured with the Profile of Nonverbal Sensitivity scale. Patients rated their physicians on caring and sensitivity, indicated the extent to which the physicians listened to what they had to say and cared about them as people, and indicated whether they felt they could call the doctor if necessary. Results support the hypothesis that the socioemotional dimension of the physician–patient relationship depends, to a moderate degree at least, on the physician's ability to understand the patient's nonverbal cues of affect and on the physician's ability to intentionally communicate affect through nonverbal channels. (26 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

红坊办公室

《中装》:红坊办公室内二层地板转化为连续的办公桌。能谈谈这一系列的创意设计灵感来源吗?Mr.Enrico:最初我们到这个地方的时候,这儿只有一层。而如果设计成两层的话,在楼