Hanan Hassan Fouad

BACKGROUND: Eye lesions, occur in nearly half of patients with Behçet's Disease (BD), can lead to irreversible damage and vision loss; however, limited studies are available on identifying risk factors for the development of vision-threatening BD (VTBD). Using an Egyptian college of rheumatology (ECR)-BD, a national cohort of BD patients, we examined the performance of machine-learning (ML) models in predicting VTBD compared to logistic regression (LR) analysis. We identified the risk factors for the development of VTBD.

METHODS: Patients with complete ocular data were included. VTBD was determined by the presence of any retinal disease, optic nerve involvement, or occurrence of blindness. Various ML-models were developed and examined for VTBD prediction. The Shapley additive explanation value was used for the interpretability of the predictors.

RESULTS: A total of 1094 BD patients [71.5% were men, mean ± SD age 36.1 ± 10 years] were included. 549 (50.2%) individuals had VTBD. Extreme Gradient Boosting was the best-performing ML model (AUROC 0.85, 95% CI 0.81, 0.90) compared with logistic regression (AUROC 0.64, 95%CI 0.58, 0.71). Higher disease activity, thrombocytosis, ever smoking, and daily steroid dose were the top factors associated with VTBD.

CONCLUSIONS: Using information obtained in the clinical settings, the Extreme Gradient Boosting identified patients at higher risk of VTBD better than the conventional statistical method. Further longitudinal studies to evaluate the clinical utility of the proposed prediction model are needed.

As part of our ongoing endeavour to identify novel inhibitors of cancer-associated CA isoforms IX and XII as possible anticancer candidates, here we describe the design and synthesis of small library of 2-aryl-quinazolin-4-yl aminobenzoic acid derivatives (, , and ) as new non-classical CA inhibitors. On account of its significance in the anticancer drug discovery and in the development of effective CAIs, the 4-anilinoquinazoline privileged scaffold was exploited in this study. Thereafter, the free carboxylic acid functionality was appended in the (), (), or -positon () of the anilino motif to furnish the target inhibitors. All compounds were assessed for their inhibitory activities against the hCA I, II (cytosolic), IX, and XII (trans-membrane, tumour-associated) isoforms. Moreover, six quinazolines (, , and ) were chosen by the NCI-USA for anti-proliferative activity evaluation against 59 human cancer cell lines representing nine tumour subpanels.

This study investigated potato tubers' starch and sugar content from different callus-sourced clones compared to the original cultivar Lady Rosetta. The clones were categorized based on their starch content, with some clones having similar starch content to Lady Rosetta, some with lower starch content, and others with higher starch content. The tubers were grown in a specific mixture of sand, peat moss, perlite, vermiculite, and foam for four months, after which their dry matter, starch, and sugar content were analyzed. The sugar content was determined using ethanol extraction, while the starch content was measured using the anthrone method. The results unveiled significant differences in starch and sugar contents among the tested potato clones. While soluble sugar content showed no significant correlation with starch content, a significant positive correlation was found between dry matter content and starch content. The dry matter content varied among the clones, with some showing significantly higher values than Lady Rosetta. SSR-PCR analysis was performed using six SSR primers to assess genetic diversity among potato clones. The analysis generated distinct and reproducible banding patterns, with 68 bands, of which 62 were polymorphic. The primers amplified unique bands specific to certain clones, and the polymorphic information content (PIC) was calculated for each marker. The genetic relationships among the clones were illustrated using a clustering dendrogram based on Jaccard's coefficient. In conclusion, the utilized SSR markers effectively identified the starch content in potato tubers clones originating from callus, thereby contributing to advancements in potato breeding and crop improvement endeavors.