Pierre-and-Marie-Curie University

About: Pierre-and-Marie-Curie University is a education organization based out in Paris, France. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Raman spectroscopy. The organization has 34448 authors who have published 56139 publications receiving 2392398 citations.

The role of evolution in the emergence of infectious diseases

Abstract: It is unclear when, where and how novel pathogens such as human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), monkeypox and severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) will cross the barriers that separate their natural reservoirs from human populations and ignite the epidemic spread of novel infectious diseases. New pathogens are believed to emerge from animal reservoirs when ecological changes increase the pathogen's opportunities to enter the human population1 and to generate subsequent human-to-human transmission2. Effective human-to-human transmission requires that the pathogen's basic reproductive number, R0, should exceed one, where R0 is the average number of secondary infections arising from one infected individual in a completely susceptible population3. However, an increase in R0, even when insufficient to generate an epidemic, nonetheless increases the number of subsequently infected individuals. Here we show that, as a consequence of this, the probability of pathogen evolution to R0 > 1 and subsequent disease emergence can increase markedly.

Gene Therapy in Patients with Transfusion-Dependent β-Thalassemia

Abstract: Background Donor availability and transplantation-related risks limit the broad use of allogeneic hematopoietic-cell transplantation in patients with transfusion-dependent β-thalassemia. After previously establishing that lentiviral transfer of a marked β-globin (βA-T87Q) gene could substitute for long-term red-cell transfusions in a patient with β-thalassemia, we wanted to evaluate the safety and efficacy of such gene therapy in patients with transfusion-dependent β-thalassemia. Methods In two phase 1–2 studies, we obtained mobilized autologous CD34+ cells from 22 patients (12 to 35 years of age) with transfusion-dependent β-thalassemia and transduced the cells ex vivo with LentiGlobin BB305 vector, which encodes adult hemoglobin (HbA) with a T87Q amino acid substitution (HbAT87Q). The cells were then reinfused after the patients had undergone myeloablative busulfan conditioning. We subsequently monitored adverse events, vector integration, and levels of replication-competent lentivirus. Efficac...

Stein's method on Wiener chaos

Abstract: We combine Malliavin calculus with Stein’s method, in order to derive explicit bounds in the Gaussian and Gamma approximations of random variables in a fixed Wiener chaos of a general Gaussian process. Our approach generalizes, refines and unifies the central and non-central limit theorems for multiple Wiener–Ito integrals recently proved (in several papers, from 2005 to 2007) by Nourdin, Nualart, Ortiz-Latorre, Peccati and Tudor. We apply our techniques to prove Berry–Esseen bounds in the Breuer–Major CLT for subordinated functionals of fractional Brownian motion. By using the well-known Mehler’s formula for Ornstein–Uhlenbeck semigroups, we also recover a technical result recently proved by Chatterjee, concerning the Gaussian approximation of functionals of finite-dimensional Gaussian vectors.

Sparsity oracle inequalities for the Lasso

Abstract: This paper studies oracle properties of l1-penalized least squares in nonparametric regression setting with random design. We show that the penalized least squares estimator satisfies sparsity oracle inequalities, i.e., bounds in terms of the number of non-zero components of the oracle vector. The results are valid even when the dimension of the model is (much) larger than the sample size and the regression matrix is not positive definite. They can be applied to high-dimensional linear regression, to nonparametric adaptive regression estimation and to the problem of aggregation of arbitrary estimators.