Molecular Biomarkers & Diagnosis

Introduction: Ovarian cancer is considered to be the leading cause of death due to gynecological malignancies. Because of lack of effective screening methods, most patients are diagnosed at an advanced stage. Therefore, there is a mandatory need to develop new markers for early detection and prognostication as well as for response to treatment and detection of disease recurrence after definitive therapy.

Aim: Our study was designed to analyse immunohistochemically the expression of transcription factors NFκB and HIF-1α, in addition to biomarkers of endothelin axis (CD-10, ETAR and ETBR) in patients with ovarian cancer and relate their expression with overall survival and response to therapy.

Methods: Ninety four samples from paraffin-embedded tissues from patients with ovarian cancer were included. The final analysis of the samples compared two cohort groups that were dichotomized to positive and negative according to histoscore (either nucleoscore or cytoscore) of each patient.

Results: Patients expressing high NFκB nuclear score, high HIF-1 α nuclear score, low CD-10 score and high ETAR and ETBR scores had worse overall survival. Moreover, platinum sensitive patients expressed lower nuclear NFκB, higher cytoplasmic HIF-1α, higher CD-10 and lower ETAR expression. NFκB cytoplasmic score and ETAR score were correlated with disease of early stage, while CD-10 histoscore was associated with advanced stages. More importantly, a combination of specific biomarkers was correlated with OS of patients.

Conclusion: Our study confirms the prognostic value of CD10 in ovarian carcinoma through its association with endothelin axis, while the last one (ET axis), mediated mainly through ETAR, may also have clinical and therapeutical impact. Finally, the nuclear expression of known transcriptional factors such as HIF-1α and NFκB could be prognostic biomarkers to assess clinical outcome and possibly predict resistance to platinum-based chemotherapy.

Context: Early detection and treatment of children infected by HIV positive mothers remain a health priority to limit the spread of the HIV/AIDS epidemic and related morbidity and mortality. In 2017 in Senegal, only 23% of children born to mothers infected with HIV-1 benefited from early infant diagnosis. This is reflected by similar numbers in the sub-Saharan region. The dissemination of early infant diagnosis is needed to assess the effectiveness of HIV-1 mother-to-child transmission (MTCT) prevention programs in resource-limited settings.

Objective: The objective of our study is to evaluate the rate of HIV-1 mother-to-child transmission in Senegal among children under 15 months of age born to HIV-1-positive mothers and identify risk factors.

Material and method: This study carried out between September 2016 and May 2018, including 393 children born to HIV+ mothers from different health facilities throughout the country. The sample used is dried blood spot (DBS). Early infant diagnosis (EID) was done by PCR on Cobas^®AmpliPrep/Cobas^®TaqMan^®HIV-1 Qualitative V. 2.0. The data was analyzed with R Studio.

Results: Of the 393 children born to HIV-positive mothers, 28 are PCR-positive showing an HIV-1 MTCT rate of 7.1%. There was no significant association between the rate of MTCT and the following sociodemographic characteristics: sex, children prophylaxis, and geographic area of infancy (p>0.05). The MTCT of HIV-1 was significantly associated with maternal prophylaxis, ethnicity, and type of breastfeeding (p <0.05).

Conclusion: Transmission rate is higher than those described in the previous national surveys of 2010, 2014 and 2016 that were respectively 4.2%; 3.1% and 3.3%.