ABSTRACT
COVID-19, known as Coronavirus Disease 2019, is a major health issue resulting from novel severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) infection. Its emergence has posed a significant menace to the global medical community and healthcare system across the world. Notably, on December 12, 2020, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved the utilization of the Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines. As of July 31, 2022, the United Stated has witnessed over 91.3 million cases of COVID-19 and nearly 1.03 million fatalities. An intriguing observation is the recent reduction in the mortality rate of COVID-19, attributed to an augmented focus on early detection, comprehensive screening, and widespread vaccination. Despite this positive trend in some demographics, it is noteworthy that the overall incidence rates of COVID-19 among African American and Hispanic populations have continued to escalate, even as mortality rates have decreased. Therefore, the objective of this research study is to present an overview of COVID-19, spotlighting the disparities among different racial and ethnic groups. It also delves into the management of COVID-19 within the minority populations. To reach our research objective, we used a publicly available COVID-19 dataset from kaggle:https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/paultimothymooney/covid19-cases-and-deaths-by-race. In addition, we obtained COVID-19 datasets from 10 different states with the highest proportion of African American populations. Many considerable strikes have been made in COVID-19. However, success rate of treatment in the African American population remains relatively limited when compared to other ethnic groups. Hence, there arises a pressing need for novel strategies and innovative approaches to not only encourage prevention measures against COVID-19, but also to increase survival rates, diminish mortality rates, and ultimately improve the health outcomes of ethnic and racial minorities.
ABSTRACT
Pancreatic cancer has a high mortality rate, which is generally related to the initial diagnosis coming at late stage disease combined with a lack of effective treatment options. Novel agents that selectively detect pancreatic cancer have potential for use in the molecular imaging of cancer, allowing for non-invasive determination of tumor therapeutic response and molecular characterization of the disease. Such agents may also be used for the targeted delivery of therapy to tumor cells while decreasing systemic effects. Using complementary assays of mRNA expression profiling to determine elevated expression in pancreatic cancer tissues relative to normal pancreas tissues, and validation of protein expression by immunohistochemistry on tissue microarray, we have identified cell-surface targets with potential for imaging and therapeutic agent development. Expression profiles of 2177 cell-surface genes for 28 pancreatic tumor specimens and 4 normal pancreas tissue samples were evaluated. Expression in normal tissues was evaluated using array data from 103 samples representing 28 organ sites as well as mining published data. One-hundred seventy unique targets were highly expressed in 2 or more of the pancreatic tumor specimens and were not expressed in the normal pancreas samples. Two targets (TLR2 and ABCC3) were further validated for protein expression by tissue microarray (TMA) based immunohistochemistry. These validated targets have potential for the development of diagnostic imaging and therapeutic agents for pancreatic cancer.
