Abstract. This article presents PANGEA, an agent platform to develop open multiagent systems, specifically those including organizational aspects such as virtual agent organizations. The platform allows the integral management of organizations and offers tools to the end user. Additionally, it includes a communication protocol based on the IRC standard, which facilitates implementation and remains robust even with a large number of connections. The introduction of a CommunicationAgent and a Sniffer make it possible to offer web services for the distributed control of interaction.

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Nowadays there is a clear trend towards using methods and tools that can help to develop multiagent systems (MAS). This study presents a multiagent based middleware for the agents behavior simulation. The main challenge of this work is the design and development of a new infrastructure that can act as a middleware to communicate the current technology in charge of the development of the multiagent system and the technology in charge of the simulation, visualization and analysis of the behavior of the agents. It is a key element when considering that MAS are autonomous, adaptive and complex systems and provides advances abilities for visualization. The proposed middleware infrastructure makes it possible to visualize the emergent agent behaviour and the entity agent. It also allows visualization of the interaction between the agent and the environment.

BackgroundMicroRNAs are known to inhibit gene expression by binding to the 3′UTR of the target transcript. Downregulation of miR-223 has been recently reported to have prognostic significance in CLL. However, there is no evidence of the pathogenetic mechanism of this miRNA in CLL patients.MethodsBy applying next-generation sequencing techniques we have detected a common polymorphism (rs2307842), in 24% of CLL patients, which disrupts the binding site for miR-223 in HSP90B1 3′UTR. We investigated whether miR-223 directly targets HSP90B1 through luciferase assays and ectopic expression of miR-223. Quantitative real-time polymerase chain reaction and western blot were used to determine HSP90B1 expression in CLL patients. The relationship between rs2307842 status, HSP90B1 expression and clinico-biological data were assessed.ResultsHSP90B1 is a direct target for miR-223 by interaction with the putative miR-223 binding site. The analysis in paired samples (CD19+ fraction cell and non-CD19+ fraction cell) showed that the presence of rs2307842 and IGHV unmutated genes determined HSP90B1 overexpression in B lymphocytes from CLL patients. These results were confirmed at the protein level by western blot. Of note, HSP90B1 overexpression was independently predictive of shorter time to the first therapy in CLL patients. By contrast, the presence of rs2307842 was not related to the outcome.ConclusionsHSP90B1 is a direct target gene of miR-223. Our results provide a plausible explanation of why CLL patients harboring miR-223 downregulation are associated with a poor outcome, pointing out HSP90B1 as a new pathogenic mechanism in CLL and a promising therapeutic target.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s12885-015-1212-2) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

The Case-Based Reasoning (CBR) is an appropriate methodology to apply in diagnosis and treatment. Research in CBR is growing and there are shortcomings, especially in the adaptation mechanism. In this paper, besides presenting a methodological review of the technology applied to the diagnostics and health sector published in recent years, a new proposal is presented to improve the adaptation stage. This proposal is focused on preparing the data to create association rules that help to reduce the number of cases and facilitate learning adaptation rules.