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Many surveillance systems of infectious diseases are syndrome-based, capturing patients by clinical manifestation. Only a fraction of patients, mostly severe cases, undergo laboratory validation to identify the underlying pathogen. Motivated by the need to understand transmission dynamics and associate risk factors of enteroviruses causing the hand, foot, and mouth disease (HFMD) in China, we developed a Bayesian spatio-temporal modeling framework for surveillance data of infectious diseases with small validation sets. A novel approach was proposed to sample unobserved pathogen-specific patient counts over space and time and was compared to an existing sampling approach. The practical utility of this framework in identifying key parameters was assessed in simulations for a range of realistic sizes of the validation set. Several designs of sampling patients for laboratory validation were compared with and without aggregation of sparse validation data. The methodology was applied to the 2009 HFMD epidemic in southern China to evaluate transmissibility and the effects of climatic conditions for the leading pathogens of the disease, enterovirus 71, and Coxsackie A16. for this article are available online. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Small area estimation is becoming increasingly popular for survey statisticians. One very important program is Small Area Income and Poverty Estimation undertaken by the United States Bureau of the Census, which aims at providing estimates related to income and poverty based on American Community Survey data at the state level and even at lower levels of geography. This article introduces global-local (GL) shrinkage priors for random effects in small area estimation to capture wide area level variation when the number of small areas is very large. These priors employ two levels of parameters, global and local parameters, to express variances of area-specific random effects so that both small and large random effects can be captured properly. We show via simulations and data analysis that use of the GL priors can improve estimation results in most cases. Supplementary materials for this article, including a standardized description of the materials available for reproducing the work, are available as an online supplement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In different types of cancer treatments, cancer-specific T cells are required for effective anticancer immunity, which has a central role in cancer immunotherapy. However, due to the multiple inhibitions of CD8+ T cells by tumor-related immune cells, CD8+ T-cell mediated antitumor immunotherapy has not achieved breakthrough progress in the treatment of solid tumors. Receptors for sialic acid (SA) are highly expressed in tumor-associated immune cells, so SA-modified nanoparticles are a drug delivery nanoplatform using tumor-associated immune cells as vehicles. To relieve the multiple inhibitions of CD8+ T cells by tumor-associated immune cells, we prepared SA-modified doxorubicin liposomes (SL-DOX, Scheme 1A). In our study, free SA decreased the toxicity of SL-DOX to tumor-associated immune cells. Compared with common liposomes, SL-DOX could inhibit tumor growth more effectively. It is worth noting that SL-DOX could not only kill tumor-related neutrophils and monocytes to relieve the multiple inhibitions of CD8+ T cells but also induce immunogenic death of tumor cells to promote the infiltration and differentiation of CD8+ T cells (Scheme 1B). Therefore, SL-DOX has potential value for the clinical therapeutic effect of CD8+ T cells mediating anti-tumor immunotherapy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Junggar Basin was an intracontinental basin enclosed by multiple orogenies in the Mesozoic. Unravelling the provenances development in the western Junggar Basin enclosed by the West Junggar Orogenic Belt (WJOB) and Tianshan Orogenic Belt (TSOB) would elucidate the exhumation history of these orogenic belts during the post-orogenic period. The TSOB includes Central Tianshan which includes a continental block with the Precambrian to early Palaeozoic metamorphic basements, while the WJOB includes Palaeozoic accretionary complexes. Given their contrasting geological histories, we use detrital garnets, metamorphic ilmenites, epidotes, and Precambrian zircons to distinguish the TSOB and detrital Cr-spinel to distinguish the WJOB. Combined with sedimentary analysis, palaeocurrents, heavy mineral data, seismic profiles, and zircon U-Pb geochronology, here we reconstruct a four-phase source-to-sink model. During the syn-rift phase, the southern basin was stably fed by the TSOB in the Triassic, evidenced by high Garnet-zircon index and stable single-peak Carboniferous detrital zircon age spectra. During the post-rift sag basin phase, the source-to-sink system experienced a significant change, because detrital zircon age spectra change into multiple peaks. During the transpressional basin phase, the WJOB replaced the TSOB as the dominant provenance in the late Middle Jurassic and the TSOB became the dominant provenance again in the Late Jurassic. Syndepositional volcanic materials provided a large amount of sediments. During the sag basin phase, lake transgression happened and the TSOB provenance could not reach the northern basin. We concluded that the WJOB experienced transpression and obvious denudation in the late Middle Jurassic, and the TSOB uplifted under transpression in the Late Jurassic. The transpression controlled the change of major provenances. The aridification in the Late Jurassic was recorded by the decrease in the Zircon-Tourmaline-Rutile index and the increase in epidotes and magnetites. The humidification in the Early Cretaceous was responded to by lake transgression and sediment recycling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]