Effectiveness of Osteopathic Manipulative Treatment in Treating Symptoms of Irritable Bowel Syndrome: A Literature Review.

Irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) is a common gastrointestinal disorder that affects a patient for their entire life. Effective treatments for IBS are scarce, leading to an increased interest in alternative treatments such as osteopathic manipulative treatment (OMT). OMT uses hands-on treatment to reduce pain through various methods. By focusing on visceral techniques, OMT can restore autonomic homeostasis and increase lymphatic flow. This literature review aims to investigate the efficacy of visceral OMT in reducing the severity of IBS symptoms. Five primary research studies were evaluated in this analysis. The concluding results show that visceral OMT effectively reduces the symptoms of IBS and improves patients' quality of life. Therefore, OMT should be considered an alternative therapy for treating IBS.

Fabrication approaches for high-throughput and biomimetic disease modeling.

There is often a tradeoff between in vitro disease modeling platforms that capture pathophysiologic complexity and those that are amenable to high-throughput fabrication and analysis. However, this divide is closing through the application of a handful of fabrication approaches-parallel fabrication, automation, and flow-driven assembly-to design sophisticated cellular and biomaterial systems. The purpose of this review is to highlight methods for the fabrication of high-throughput biomaterial-based platforms and showcase examples that demonstrate their utility over a range of throughput and complexity. We conclude with a discussion of future considerations for the continued development of higher-throughput in vitro platforms that capture the appropriate level of biological complexity for the desired application. STATEMENT OF SIGNIFICANCE: There is a pressing need for new biomedical tools to study and understand disease. These platforms should mimic the complex properties of the body while also permitting investigation of many combinations of cells, extracellular cues, and/or therapeutics in high-throughput. This review summarizes emerging strategies to fabricate biomimetic disease models that bridge the gap between complex tissue-mimicking microenvironments and high-throughput screens for personalized medicine.

Dendritic Cell-Activating Magnetic Nanoparticles Enable Early Prediction of Antitumor Response with Magnetic Resonance Imaging.

Cancer vaccines initiate antitumor responses in a subset of patients, but the lack of clinically meaningful biomarkers to predict treatment response limits their development. Here, we design multifunctional RNA-loaded magnetic liposomes to initiate potent antitumor immunity and function as an early biomarker of treatment response. These particles activate dendritic cells (DCs) more effectively than electroporation, leading to superior inhibition of tumor growth in treatment models. Inclusion of iron oxide enhances DC transfection and enables tracking of DC migration with magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). We show that T2*-weighted MRI intensity in lymph nodes is a strong correlation of DC trafficking and is an early predictor of antitumor response. In preclinical tumor models, MRI-predicted "responders" identified 2 days after vaccination had significantly smaller tumors 2-5 weeks after treatment and lived 73% longer than MRI-predicted "nonresponders". These studies therefore provide a simple, scalable nanoparticle formulation to generate robust antitumor immune responses and predict individual treatment outcome with MRI.