Citations

The integration of palliative care into routine oncology practice is the standard of care by most leading cancer organizations. Palliative medicine helps to deliver higher quality of care at a lower cost. However, there are barriers to implementing palliative oncology at many institutions for myriad reasons. In this article, we discuss an innovative strategy that ASCO implemented called the Communities of Practice (CoP). We share our experiences as the Palliative Care CoP and how our group seeks to develop processes and structures to collectively promote systemic change and enhance palliative care delivery for people with cancer. Our Palliative Care CoP engages with senior leaders, administrators, and those in power to achieve a shared vision of delivering holistic health care for people with serious illness. We continue to evolve to meet our members' growing needs by addressing eight main domains: (1) increasing palliative care education and resources; (2) creating opportunities for global palliative care research; (3) providing peer mentorship and community building; (4) engaging with patient advocates; (5) supporting and developing interdisciplinary teams; (6) assisting with professional development and identity formation, especially for trainees and early career faculty; (7) extending our outreach through social media; and (8) enhancing the clinical practice of palliative oncology. The ASCO CoP has been a vital forum to realize ASCO's mission of conquering cancer and advancing the Art and Science of Cancer Care: From Comfort to Cure.

Maintaining pH is critical for proper cellular and organ function. To measure intracellular pH, we made a novel genetically encoded protein, pHire, that increases red fluorescence with increasing pH. Thus, pHire allows for the coupling of multiple fluorescent tags without spectral overlap. We have expressed pHire in mammalian epithelial cells, Drosophila, and mice. In this study, our goal was to characterize pHire’s spectral properties by expression in human cells (HEK293) and in E.coli. To biophysically characterize pHire, we made a maltose binding protein (MBP)-pHire fusion protein to purify from E.coli. Pelleting individual colony growths revealed pink bacterial pellets which fluoresced with mCherry filters. Rather than purifying the MBP-pHire protein, equal volumes of bacteria were permeabilized with nigericin and high K+ solution for pH 5 to 9. These aliquots were then used to gather the fluorescence excitation and emission spectra of pHire, allowing us to determine the excitation and emission peaks of pHire as a function of pH. Our results showed peaks at Ex579 nm and Em611 nm, or roughly mCherry. Pelleted bacteria could also be fixed in perfusion chambers, revealing the same calibration curve as in mammalian cells and flies. Next, stable HEK293-pHire cells were selected to assay acid-base transport using NH4Cl or CO2/HCO3− in perfusion experiments. These HEK-pHire cells have less fluorescence than MBP-pHire bacteria but show the same Ex/Em peaks. However, an in-frame ATG 5’ to pHire in a mouse (adding 23 amino acids), removed pHire pH-dependence and decreased bacterial fluorescent output. Together these results indicate that pHire is biophysically similar in cells tested but that unstructured N-terminal additions block pH-responses. Funding: R25-DK101405, R21-DK129897. This is the full abstract presented at the American Physiology Summit 2024 meeting and is only available in HTML format. There are no additional versions or additional content available for this abstract. Physiology was not involved in the peer review process.

Mechanical forces on the airway can contribute to altered contractility and remodeling in airway diseases, but the mechanisms are not clearly understood. Using human airway smooth muscle cells exposed to cyclic forces with static stretch to mimic breathing and static pressure, we found that the effects of stretch are mediated through STIM1, resulting in the activation of multiple pathways, including Piezo channels and the inflammasome, with potential downstream influences on contractility and remodeling.