Search

Background The treatment of Nocardia species found in the sputum of cystic fibrosis patients is of unknown value. Methods We conducted a retrospective analysis of the impact of directed oral antibiotic therapy against Nocardia spp. isolated from the sputum of 17 cystic fibrosis patients over a 10-year period. Pulmonary Function Tests were used as the clinical indicator of the disease state and the data were analyzed by general linear mixed model statistics with univariate analysis. Results Pulmonary Function Test values of all patients studied showed no significant difference before, during, or after the antibiotic treatment period. Treatment groups did not differ from non-treatment groups. This held true for Forced Expiratory Volume over 1 s and Functional Vital Capacity analysis. In addition, individual patient analysis did not reveal any trends or outliers. Conclusions Oral antibiotic therapy of cystic fibrosis patients colonized with Nocardia does not appear to affect clinical outcome. This suggests that deferring therapy may be an acceptable alternative and justifies conducting a future placebo controlled trial. In addition, this study model may be useful in analyzing the effect of therapy on other rare and difficult organisms, such as fungi and mycobacteria in the cystic fibrosis population.

In vitro experiments have shown the PIM1 kinase to have diverse biological roles in cell survival, proliferation and differentiation. In humans, PIM1 is often expressed in both normal and transformed cells. The PIM1 kinase is a true oncogene implicated in early transformation and tumour progression in haematopoietic malignancies and prostate carcinomas. It is associated with aggressive subgroups of lymphoma, is a marker of poor prognosis in prostate carcinomas and has been suggested to have a role in hormone insensitivity of prostate malignancies. PIM1 has a possible role in other carcinomas with 6p21 genomic alterations. On one hand, PIM1 (due to its role in malignancy) appears to be a promising target for drug development programmes but, on the other hand, the complexity of its molecular structure has posed challenges in the development of PIM1 inhibitors. In this review we discuss PIM1 expression in human tissues (including some new data from our laboratory), its role in human malignancies, as well as the possibilities and challenges in the development of target therapy for PIM1.