scispace - formally typeset
Search or ask a question
Institution

University of Cagliari

EducationCagliari, Italy
About: University of Cagliari is a education organization based out in Cagliari, Italy. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Dopamine. The organization has 11029 authors who have published 29046 publications receiving 771023 citations. The organization is also known as: Università degli Studi di Cagliari & Universita degli Studi di Cagliari.


Papers
More filters
Journal ArticleDOI
01 Nov 2018-Gut
TL;DR: This five-gene methylation panel can be used to circumvent the absence of patient-specific mutations for monitoring tumour burden dynamics in liquid biopsy under different therapeutic regimens.
Abstract: Objective Mutations in cell-free circulating DNA (cfDNA) have been studied for tracking disease relapse in colorectal cancer (CRC). This approach requires personalised assay design due to the lack of universally mutated genes. In contrast, early methylation alterations are restricted to defined genomic loci allowing comprehensive assay design for population studies. Our objective was to identify cancer-specific methylated biomarkers which could be measured longitudinally in cfDNA (liquid biopsy) to monitor therapeutic outcome in patients with metastatic CRC (mCRC). Design Genome-wide methylation microarrays of CRC cell lines (n=149) identified five cancer-specific methylated loci ( EYA4 , GRIA4 , ITGA4 , MAP3K14-AS1, MSC ). Digital PCR assays were employed to measure methylation of these genes in tumour tissue DNA (n=82) and cfDNA from patients with mCRC (n=182). Plasma longitudinal assessment was performed in a patient subset treated with chemotherapy or targeted therapy. Results Methylation in at least one marker was detected in all tumour tissue samples and in 156 mCRC patient cfDNA samples (85.7%). Plasma marker prevalence was 71.4% for EYA4 , 68.5% for GRIA4 , 69.7% for ITGA4 , 69.1% for MAP3K14-AS1% and 65.1% for MSC . Dynamics of methylation markers was not affected by treatment type and correlated with objective tumour response and progression-free survival. Conclusion This five-gene methylation panel can be used to circumvent the absence of patient-specific mutations for monitoring tumour burden dynamics in liquid biopsy under different therapeutic regimens. This method might be proposed for assessing pharmacodynamics in clinical trials or when conventional imaging has limitations.

177 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Obese Southern Europeans carrying the 148M allele have increased indices of liver damage uncoupled from proxy measures of insulin resistance.
Abstract: The PNPLA3 I148M variant (rs738409) is robustly associated with hepatic steatosis. Intriguingly, initial findings in cohorts with a mean body mass index (BMI) of 30 kg m−2 also suggested that it is associated with elevated liver enzymes but not with insulin resistance and dyslipidaemia. To determine whether the PNPLA3 variant alters the susceptibility of morbidly obese subjects to develop liver injury and metabolic sequelae. The study was carried out in 678 obese Italians (mean BMI=41 kg m−2) who were genotyped for the I148M variant. All participants provided fasting blood samples and then underwent oral glucose tolerance tests. Indices of liver injury (alanine transaminase (ALT), aspartate transaminase (AST)), glucose tolerance and insulin resistance were measured. Markers of hepatic injury such as ALT and AST were significantly higher in carriers of the 148M allele (P=2.2 × 10−5 and 0.001, respectively). In all, 50% of 148M risk allele homozygotes had pathological levels of ALT (>40 U l−1) compared with 25% of 148I allele homozygotes (P=0.005). Glucose tolerance and insulin sensitivity were similar in all three genotypes. Obese Southern Europeans carrying the 148M allele have increased indices of liver damage uncoupled from proxy measures of insulin resistance.

177 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: This manuscript reviews the reports of a multidisciplinary national meeting on endocrine disrupting chemicals and suggests effects of EDCs on prenatal growth, thyroid function, glucose metabolism and obesity, puberty, fertility, and on carcinogenesis mainly through epigenetic mechanisms.
Abstract: Wildlife has often presented and suggested the effects of endocrine disrupting chemicals (EDCs). Animal studies have given us an important opportunity to understand the mechanisms of action of many chemicals on the endocrine system and on neurodevelopment and behaviour, and to evaluate the effects of doses, time and duration of exposure. Although results are sometimes conflicting because of confounding factors, epidemiological studies in humans suggest effects of EDCs on prenatal growth, thyroid function, glucose metabolism and obesity, puberty, fertility, and on carcinogenesis mainly through epigenetic mechanisms. This manuscript reviews the reports of a multidisciplinary national meeting on this topic.

177 citations

Proceedings ArticleDOI
22 Mar 2017
TL;DR: DroidSieve is proposed, an Android malware classifier based on static analysis that is fast, accurate, and resilient to obfuscation, and exploits obfuscation-invariant features and artifacts introduced by obfuscation mechanisms used in malware.
Abstract: With more than two million applications, Android marketplaces require automatic and scalable methods to efficiently vet apps for the absence of malicious threats. Recent techniques have successfully relied on the extraction of lightweight syntactic features suitable for machine learning classification, but despite their promising results, the very nature of such features suggest they would unlikely--on their own--be suitable for detecting obfuscated Android malware. To address this challenge, we propose DroidSieve, an Android malware classifier based on static analysis that is fast, accurate, and resilient to obfuscation. For a given app, DroidSieve first decides whether the app is malicious and, if so, classifies it as belonging to a family of related malware. DroidSieve exploits obfuscation-invariant features and artifacts introduced by obfuscation mechanisms used in malware. At the same time, these purely static features are designed for processing at scale and can be extracted quickly. For malware detection, we achieve up to 99.82% accuracy with zero false positives; for family identification of obfuscated malware, we achieve 99.26% accuracy at a fraction of the computational cost of state-of-the-art techniques.

177 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: These results demonstrate that the therapeutic sequence CY–BEAM–ASCT has the capacity to completely suppress MR-enhancing activity, an effect that is sustained with time.
Abstract: Background: Autologous hematopoietic stem cell transplantation (ASCT) has been recently utilized with encouraging results in patients with poorly controlled MS. Objective: To determine in severe cases of MS the effect of ASCT on gadolinium (Gd)-enhanced MRI and to obtain information on clinical course and safety. Methods: In a cooperative study, 10 patients with rapidly evolving secondary progressive MS were transplanted, after BEAM conditioning regimen (carmustine, etoposide, cytosine-arabinoside, and melphalan), with unmanipulated autologous peripheral blood SC mobilized with high-dose cyclophosphamide (CY; 4 g/m 2 ) and granulocyte-colony-stimulating factor. Triple-dose Gd-enhanced scans were performed monthly for a pretreatment period of 3 months and compared with serial monthly Gd-enhanced MRI for the following 6 months and then once every 3 months. Results: The median follow-up is now 15 months (range 4 to 30 months). The number of Gd-enhancing lesions decreased immediately after mobilization with CY and finally dropped to zero in all cases after the conditioning regimen. The number of new T2-weighted positive lesions paralleled data obtained for Gd-enhanced MRI. Clinically, patients improved slightly or remained stable. Conclusion: These results demonstrate that the therapeutic sequence CY–BEAM–ASCT has the capacity to completely suppress MR-enhancing activity, an effect that is sustained with time. The final impact of this procedure on disease course remains to be established.

177 citations


Authors

Showing all 11160 results

NameH-indexPapersCitations
Herbert W. Marsh15264689512
Michele Parrinello13363794674
Dafna D. Gladman129103675273
Peter J. Anderson12096663635
Alessandro Vespignani11841963824
C. Patrignani1171754110008
Hermine Katharina Wöhri11662955540
Francesco Muntoni11596352629
Giancarlo Comi10996154270
Giorgio Parisi10894160746
Luca Benini101145347862
Alessandro Cardini101128853804
Nicola Serra100104246640
Jurg Keller9938935628
Giulio Usai9751739392
Network Information
Related Institutions (5)
University of Florence
79.5K papers, 2.3M citations

97% related

Sapienza University of Rome
155.4K papers, 4.3M citations

97% related

University of Bologna
115.1K papers, 3.4M citations

96% related

University of Padua
114.8K papers, 3.6M citations

96% related

University of Milan
139.7K papers, 4.6M citations

96% related

Performance
Metrics
No. of papers from the Institution in previous years
YearPapers
202374
2022230
20211,898
20201,903
20191,636
20181,600